There's Way More To Aaron Gocs' & Aaron Chen's Acts Than You Might Think

For a lot of people, the worst thing a comedian can do is take comedy too seriously – at least publicly, anyway. After all, for many audience members, comedians are meant to totally commit to their singularly blase persona. They’re meant to stumble on stage as though ideas have only just popped into their head; as though they’re your wittiest mate, slinging back beers at the pub, spouting inventive new epithets and spinning long, involved stories.

That’s particularly true for outsider comedians, those offbeat artists who perform strange, tangential sets, and who don’t so much challenge the status quo as they do totally demolish it. Ask even some members of the mainstream media establishment about the work ethic of an outsider comedian, and they may well assume it involves eating a lot of pot noodles, getting very stoned and writing only when the impulse takes them.

But it’s far from the truth. Take Aaron Chen, celebrated outsider comic, who wakes up around the same time most days, sits down and starts writing. “That’s my process,” says the talented young performer, known for his frequently absurd, often deceptively dense stand-up sets.  

“I wake up every day and write three pages. It becomes a bit of a meditative process… It ranges from silly writing to deeply personal and traumatic stuff. Sometimes there are some jokes in there. Often it’ll just be like, ‘I woke up today, and I’m feeling fresh and ready to take on the day.’ Or the opposite can be also true.”

It’s not hard to see why some might be surprised at Chen’s discipline. After all, taken at face value, his sets appear singularly relaxed and offhanded. From the outside, it seems as though he follows tangents while he finds them funny, only to abandon them when that’s no longer the case. Swerving from topic to topic, his patter takes abrupt tonal shifts.

And yet that frivolousness is an ingeniously constructed part of the act. Chen works harder than most comedians. On the day he talks to The Music, he’s hours out from playing another show. But he doesn’t find it stressful anymore, performing. “It’s invigorating and powerful,” he says. “It’s like you’re constantly sharpening a chef’s knife – like you can cut through any celery, or onions, or rutabagas.”

The genesis of the jokes themselves come easily – often while Chen is walking the streets, brainstorming new ideas or not really thinking about things at all. “Something will just pop into my mind,” he explains. “Or I’ll have four different ideas and they’ll all amalgamate into one idea – like, I’ll draw weird links between different things.” 

It’s actually writing the set that proves hard. Chen’s upcoming show, Piss Off (Just Kidding), which has taken over two years of tinkering with, still isn’t finished. It’s been road-tested, and practised, and reshaped, and mucked around with tonally, and Chen still doesn’t think it’ll be done for a little while.

“During the year, you’re just doing club spots, so you’re trying to write as many jokes as possible,” he explains. “But then as the show comes along, you’re writing in this weird one-hour structure where they should be some pathos or some pay-off or something like that. And the way you approach it changes, and you add meaning to things that were previously there just to get laughs or whatever.”

It’s work – real honest work – although it’s the kind that has been carefully designed to appear as little like work as possible. After all, the goal is for the comedian to step off stage and appear as though they’ve just freewheeled for an hour. According to fellow outsider comedian Aaron Gocs, it’s the way comedians can stop themselves from appearing as though they’re “spitting out jokes like a jukebox.

“I’ve had people come up to me after and say, ‘Did you think of any of that before you went up?’” Gocs says in his trademark Aussie drawl. “It’s like, ‘Yeah, that was almost an hour. I didn’t just come up with it.’ But I guess that’s good and bad. It’s good that they don’t just think you’re going through the motions like a robot. But you’d like them to think there was some preparation.”

Gocs, who broke out into the near-mainstream with a viral video that depicted him listening to Korn while eating corn and wearing cornrows, is as dedicated and driven as Chen. He thinks hard about his comedy, deciding upon its ethical implications before he even takes to the stage – his new show Divorced... With Children marks the first time that he’s ever discussed his personal life in front of a crowd, and whether or not to go down the autobiographical route was something he deliberated over for some time. 

“I’m opening up a bit more and talking about personal things,” Gocs explains. “I’m talking about some of the things that have happened in my life. When I started out in stand-up, I always thought, it’s a bit narcissistic talking about yourself. I thought, 'I’m nothing special.'"

“But I had a few people – like, my friends and other performers – who said things like, ‘You’ve actually had a bit of an interesting life.’ And it’s true. I think if something interesting to talk about is just there, sometimes it’s time to talk about it.”

Even still, Gocs has learnt that no matter how much he loves comedy – no matter how much it means to him – it’s admittedly not as backbreaking as some of the other work he could be doing. “Compared to other jobs I’ve had in factories and warehouses – a lot of manual labour – it’s very different,” he says, and he laughs, loudly and deeply.