Triumph Of The Wil 

As he prepares to debut ‘Man Vs Wil’, the follow-up to last year’s Helpmann winning ‘Wilful Misconduct’, the Bear Grylls of Australian comedy talks floods, fear and hardcore knob-out action.

You’re headed to Queensland soon for the Brisbane Comedy Festival - given everything you’ve seen in the news lately, are you feeling any trepidation? Ah, I've been in the US… has something happened in Queensland? No, even here in the US, that has been the biggest fucking story… people who don't know anything about Australia other than Crocodile Dundee and Yahoo Serious are like, 'what's going on with Brisbane and the floods?' And I'm like, 'hang on, you thought Australia was where Arnold Schwarzenegger was from the other day, and now you're interested in the Brisbane floods?'

It really is amazing to be away from home when something that full-on is happening. We threw a couple of fundraising parties and auctions over here, and then we did a big benefit gig at the Hollywood Improv. It's almost because we were further away that we felt this real connection to it, in a different way than I ever have being at home in the middle of things. I found that to be a really interesting experience to go through, because it stirred different things in me, and I'm not even really sure what they were. It was much like going through puberty. I was tingling and I knew I enjoyed it but I didn't understand it or any of its effects.

Your new show sees you taking on the most dangerous game of all - man. What have you got in your arsenal? I don't know! I think I have some interesting things to say, but the last two months have been like pre-season football, and everybody flies in pre-season. Everybody looks like they could win the Brownlow in pre-season. That's what it's like with ideas. I have all these ideas; just pages and pages of notes. I've scribbled on things and drawn diagrams. And every one of them is a winner in December. In December, they are all going to be the greatest ideas of all time.

In January, I start to cull them down and say, 'look, not everyone's going to play seniors, some are going to have to play in the reserves’. But I'm still thinking, 'jeez, we've got a lot of fucking stars, we might win the firsts and the seconds this year’. Then it gets to now, early in February… Now I have no fucking idea if any of them are any good. The truth is, you don't know until you start tellin' em.

I try to challenge myself each year to say something more interesting than I said the year before. Last year's show was my best received. That was great, but I feel like it raised the bar so high that now I'm like, ‘fuck, what am I going to say this year?’ They were all the interesting things I had to say, and I wasted them all in one fucking show!

Is it too late to get kidnapped in Thailand so I could write a show about that? I could adopt a baby. That'd be funny. I'd be the first person in history to adopt a baby purely for the sake of a comedy festival show. One man and a baby!

I once read that Michelangelo used to say the sculpture was already inside the stone, and he just had to release it. That's how I feel in February. I've got the stone and I'm confident there's a sculpture in there that people are gonna dig. Now where the fuck is it?

No matter how it shakes out, I’m sure you’re having a better pre-season than the Saints. Yeah, I've had less knob-out action. Like, heaps less. I have seen that photo so many times, though. I keep showing it to people because of that story Nick Riewoldt told, where he was like, 'oh, I sleep naked,' because, yeah, we all sleep naked when we're on an end-of-season footy trip with all our mates in the same room, there's nothing weird about that, 'and I just got out of bed and they took a photo of me.'

Now why would I suspect that Nick Riewoldt, the captain of the St Kilda Football Club, a respected man in the AFL, would lie on the public record? Of course I wouldn't, he's a trusted member of society. So, clearly, the photo must have been of him trying to grab the sheets or protect himself or put his hands over his penis or something.

So I was shocked when I saw the photo and he was holding his penis on either side in a displaying motion while a teammate was holding a box of condoms next to him. Isn't it unfortunate that he's stumbled out of bed, seen someone with a camera, gone to cover up his penis, but instead missed? A man who's skilled at catching a football, a man who generally has great coordination, has gone to cover his knob and missed it.

Clearly, if he missed balls with his hands that badly on a football field they'd slap straight into his face, but he's missed it and displayed his penis. And, in a brief bit of really unfortunate timing, a mate of his is walking by with a box of condoms while he's sleeping there naked in the same room. Nothing weird about that, it's an end-of-season trip, perfectly natural.
So he's gotten out of bed at the exact moment his friend has tripped right near his cock with that box of condoms, and this has all been caught on camera by a guy who's got a camera out in a room where all his friends are sleeping naked. Whatever, it's an end-of-season trip, people sleep naked together, there's nothing weird about that.

I've had to show that photo to a lot of people just to see if any of them can see the little gap I can see between the testimony of the respected captain of the St Kilda Football Club, a man I have no reason not to trust, and the photographic evidence I've seen with my own eyes. There just seems to be a little gap, a little gulf, a little discrepancy. But I'm not saying he lied. I need to point that out. I am not saying that he lied.

It’s one of those defences thats almost worse than the accusation, isn’t it? He’d be better off putting his hand up. That's exactly it! You are totally right! If he'd come out and gone, 'look, we were on an end-of-season trip and we were being dickheads; now nobody's proud of this, and it's definitely not gonna happen again, but that's all it was and let's not make too big a deal out of it', I would've gone, ‘you know what? You copped your whack, you spoke straight, good on ya, go on your way.’ But instead he made it something much worse than it was. If people learn nothing else from watching 'Law & Order', they should know the cover-up is always worse than the crime.

‘Man Vs Wil’ plays at the Brisbane Comedy Festival from March 22-27. briscomfest.com