Why His Family And Fiance Make For Great Skit Material

Melbourne-based comedian Dave Thornton is a man of many talents — in recent years he's been ubiquitous on Australian TV screens as well as making big inroads into the world of breakfast radio — but stand-up comedy remains his first true love, the aspect of his burgeoning career that he couldn't live without despite its many failings

"Yeah, without a doubt, for better or worse," he concedes of his love of the form. "I was talking to Wil Anderson about it recently — and of all the Aussie comics if you're going to have a career like that you'd be pretty happy, and he still loves it, he probably loves it more now than he used to — but we both pondered, 'Why do we love the career option that exists in a dirty bar where quite often all you get paid in is a beer tab?' Why can't I have a love of high falutin' cinema or something? But also all of the other things I do only came along because of the stand-up, so I've got to keep going on with it.

"Why do we love the career option that exists in a dirty bar where quite often all you get paid in is a beer tab?'"

"I'll put it like this — I grew up in Geelong and I've still got some of best mates down there, and stand-up is like one of my really old mates where sometimes I'm like, 'I don't even know why I still hang out with him!' I've known him for so long now and we've been through heaps of shit, but sometimes he's quite annoying but I've known him for too long and just can't get rid of him. But there's definitely worse mates to have, that's for sure.

"I appreciate how you've given us the grace as comedians to say that we've got a writing plan, in reality it's some weird mash of us doing stupid crap and then reporting back to an audience. I don't think it's very structural, but luckily I've done a fair amount of stupid crap over the last 12 months so it's getting there. I've got a front row seat to the stupidity of my life so I might as well take advantage of it. There's a lot of things happening in the world but I've also got a gold class ticket to what this idiot goes through, so you think, 'Well that's going to make up a fair chuck of [the show]'.

"Mind you my family is slowly but surely wearing thin on me reporting back on the stupidity of their life. When I started in comedy a little over ten years ago — I would have been 25 — you start winding up your family and whatever and they think it's cute because they're just happy that you're doing something that you love, and now the audiences grow and you start going on TV and hanging shit on them and then they're, like, 'Hang on buddy! We gotta pull back on this!' And now my poor fiance, now there's this point when anytime she screws up and she's like, 'C'mon!' It's not my fault, what am I supposed to do?' Like the other day we were walking down the street and we weren't exactly sure where we were going and my fiance's looking at Google Maps and I hear this 'Boomph!' sound and I turn around and she's walked straight into a street sign! She looks at me, and I was like, 'Did you just not look where you were going because you were looking where you were going?' and she's, like, 'Oh, this is going to go on stage,' and I did it that night and it killed! But that's not really on me.

"But every time you see a stand-up skit about a partner you've got to know that behind the scenes there's a pretty fancy holiday that has to be paid for to make up for what has been said on stage."