'Stand-Up Is My Addiction'

Smart, effervescent and easy to talk to, Wil Anderson still manages to be charming despite being up for almost 30 hours straight. “Even my jet lag has jet lag,” he tells me, having just landed back in Australia for a few days before returning to the US to finish his Wiluminati tour. Having spent the last six months overseas, he’s wasting no time soaking up the Aussie lifestyle before he heads back. “I’ve got to leave again on Sunday so I’m trying not to make my heart ache too much. I’m eating a lot of avocado on toast because you really can’t get good avocado on toast in the rest of the world,” he tells me. “But really, I’ve been away for about seven months by the end of this year, so I’m looking forward to spending the summer in Australia.”

Though Wiluminati has been exhausting, it’s helped him grow as a comedian. “I wanted to take a year just to do stand-up, and having that time brings you to a whole different level in the show that I had never really got to before. It’s when you know the show so well, you can tell it differently every night because you can adapt to the audience and you can read the crowd, and present it in the right way because you’re so comfortable with it.”

Explaining this wisdom will imbue his 2015 tour, Free Wil, in which Anderson entertainingly links his creative output past, present and future to that of one of his favourite bands: Radiohead. “I feel like maybe last year’s show was OK Computer and then this year’s show was a bit more what I wanted to do, like Kid A. Next year’s show is kind of like King Of Thieves, which kind of felt like the album that combined the best bits of all they wanted to do. I feel like that’s where I’m at. I have more of an idea about this show and how I do it than I ever had before, and now I can just use it in the way that I enjoy.”

It’s ABC television’s The Gruen Transfer for which Anderson is best known, and resuming in 2015 after a year off, the impending return wasn’t straightforward. “Having this year to do stand-up, it was probably the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make in my career to come back. It was kind of like ‘it’s time to do stand-up for the rest of your life’ and there was a part of me that just really, really wanted to do that. But I kind of thought I owed it to the show, the audience [and] all the people who made it.”

Despite suffering from chronic osteoarthritis, it’s obvious Anderson hasn’t let it slow him down. “You don’t want to be a stand-up comedian who can’t stand up,” he laughs. “I always liked to think I could at least fulfil the standing up part of stand-up comedy, but now it’s really going to have to be reliant on the coffee.”