Feeling Good About Hanging With Scouts

Justin Hamilton is the brains behind two hit podcasts, curator of Melbourne institution comedy night The Shelf, a regular face in comedy clubs and a captivating storyteller who performed his festival show Johnny Loves Mary Forever 1994 around 75 times last year, including a run at the Edinburgh Fringe.

So as you might imagine, he took a couple of weeks off at the end of the year to relax in Bali at a friend’s wedding – but it wasn’t long into 2015 before his first disappointment. “Seven minutes after midnight we were sitting watching the fireworks and [an old female friend] leaned over and patted me on the stomach and said, ‘Jeez you’ve gotten fat,’” he laughs. “That was brutal. Seven minutes into the new year and I’ve already got body image issues.”

"Seven minutes into the new year and I’ve already got body image issues.”

However, Hamilton says he was brought back from the brink by his first gig of the year, performing to 14-17-year-old scouts. After the show, they asked him how long he’d been doing comedy. “I said, ‘21 years – think about the year that you were born. My first gig was four-and-a-half years before that,’” he says. “And they said, ‘How old are you?’ and I said, ‘I’m 42.’ And they all looked at each other and said, ‘Wow, you are in good shape.’ If you had told me at the start of the year that a woman would make me feel bad and a 16-year-old boy would bring me back from the edge, I’d have thought, ‘Oh man, I’m gonna go to jail.’”

Hamilton’s last festival show was one of his trademark captivating narratives which intercut partly with accounts of his experiences performing for the troops in Afghanistan, and a “moment where I thought things might go bang”, and he says that after reliving that moment on stage 75 times it put him a little on edge and he found it mentally tiring.

When I was growing up, nerds and normal people did not mix.

This year’s show, while thematically linked, is more traditional – a collection of bite-sized bits and meandering musings “about looking back on who you are to work out how you move forwards, and just enjoy life”, and about how the world has changed in weird ways – like how the geeks have inherited the earth. “I was at Captain America: The Winter Soldier last year and I was loving it, and there was an eight-year-old kid sitting in front of me getting so into the action. When the big fight scene at the end kicked in, he exploded and ran down the front with his jacket on his head like a cape. So while I was watching the movie I was watching this kid jumping up and down in front of the screen, fighting imaginary villains. It was awesome but a couple of people around me started cracking the shits.

“I looked around and the cinema was full of really hot-looking dudes and really pretty women not wearing much and I just thought, ‘When did nerd culture take over the world?’ When I was growing up, nerds and normal people did not mix. In the past, if a bully walked up to a nerd on the beach they’d probably kick sand in his face. Now the bully would say, ‘Hey do you know how to download the latest season of Game Of Thrones?’”