Review: Wil Anderson 8/1/12

Wil Anderson walked into the Friend in Hand along with a burst of heat that came with anyone opening the side door. Even in the forty degree heat he wore skinny jeans and a jacket, an impossible decision on a day like today. He surveyed the pub, a famed Sydney comedy venue of which he has performed countless times, nodded at his manager who was ordering at the bar and walked upstairs to the the small theatre on the second floor. The majority of the patrons were dedicated fans who heard about the gig from Twitter, followed him upstairs and took their seats.

Despite the best efforts of the theatre's air conditioning you could still feel the abnormally hot breeze slipping in through the windows. Anderson placed three recording devices around the room, took the mic and offered a final warning: that this was a free performance for a reason, that he could not promise even a single well formed joke, that everything he would say for the next hour would be completely off the top of his head.

Stand-up comedy is a combination of two refined skills, writing jokes and controlling a crowd. Good writing is essential to good comedy, but it is the ability to understand and manipulate the audience that makes stand-up comedy so hypnotic as an art form. It is this skill, learned only through experience and through years of hard work on unfriendly stages, that defines the difference between professional comedians and their amateur counterparts.

Wil Anderson's improvised set at the Friend in Hand was an exercise in understanding an audience. It has become a ritual of his to perform these free sets at the Hand in January as part of the way he writes his touring shows, a period that he referred to in the show as 'agonising'. He uses these sessions to return to the simplicity of stand-up and away from the abstraction of writing.

Viewing this raw comedic effort was a strange experience, particularly as someone accustomed to his polished stage shows with their well formed anecdotes and coherent strands of thought. You could see the essence of  Anderson's comedic stylings, particularly the effortless blending of personal stories with broader themes and ideas. There was even stretches of deep contemplation in between punchlines, which has become an increasingly prominent part of his style over the years. However, there was a very different feel to this set, indeed being a free gig at a venue he clearly loves with a crowd filled with people who were clearly devoted fans he was in some ways more relaxed than his normal onstage persona. You could see the concentration on his face with every joke he made as he felt the room's response to try and understand what would work.

The material was tangental and clearly unpolished; he often had to ask the audience where he had left off stories, and indeed this became almost a joke in itself. The set was often formless, and properly structured jokes were rare, as is to be expected at an improvised and experimental gig. There was, however, a lot of very promising material throughout, particularly in regards to his experience of going back to his home town in country Victoria where his family still lives. Another early quip about Anh Do, who had opened for Anderson years earlier, was by far the most popular joke of the night and one that will easily find a place in his upcoming show.

But by far the most interesting section of the set was a joke concerning the former host of another ABC show who has been convicted of owning child pornography. The joke itself was funny, I had heard a variation in his show from last year, but what was compelling that Anderson immediately retracted the joke, saying "I knew the guy. I liked the guy.  It's hard to learn that people you like don't always do good things." It was a powerful moment reflective of Anderson's maturity as a comic, one that is unlikely to make it into his festival routine in any way.

After an hour or so, Anderson, who was by this stage sweating through his clothes, stepped offstage and thanked everyone for coming. It was eight o'clock and still over thirty degrees outside, the audience was pretty keen to leave the humid theatre. After everyone left you could see Anderson talking to his manager at the top of the stairs and collecting up the recording devices he had left, he had barely walked offstage but he was already clearly analysing the set for material to keep. He has two more months to go.