Dark side of musical clown

Tim Minchin uses his comedy to cope with terror. Photo / Supplied

When I meet Tim Minchin in the rarefied surrounds of London's Groucho Club, I can't help wondering if the Perth-born musician-comedian will write a song about me.

Two years after his British debut at the 2005 Edinburgh Fringe Festival received a scathing one-star write-up in the Guardian, he penned a vitriolic, hilarious number about horribly murdering the journalist in question.

"It's a response and it's done in my genre," says the 33-year-old.

"His genre is the poison pen and mine is poison comedy. The fact that it's done so brutally is why it's funny. I'm a pathetic artist, who wants to kill someone for writing a bad review about them."

Minchin no longer reads his press, although he admits to sometimes succumbing to the occasional glowing five-star appraisal.

"I don't think I'm more sensitive than most people," he says.

"If you put yourself in the public sphere, you can find yourself on a real rollercoaster of glorification and damnation. You get into this cycle of nonsense and that's why so many public personas are so messed up. I need to focus on my shows, my audience."

Perhaps the hapless hack was confused by Minchin's idiosyncratic performance, which combines humour with music. At a recent gig at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, he cut a striking figure with his long, wild hair, black eyeliner and bare feet. But what really stood out is his sheer musical dexterity with tunes like Only a Ginger Can Call Another Ginger Ginger proving as toe-tappingly infectious as humorous.

"One of the things that surprises people is that the music is proper, it's not just a function of the comedy," he says.

"It's part of what the show is. I no longer feel the need to justify myself. If you don't like coming to see someone slap the hell out of a piano and do songs about God and sex and if you don't like how at the end I tend to do a sentimental encore, that's okay because I know a great deal of people who do."

Minchin, who refers to himself as a muso rather than a stand-up comic, was in several bands before turning to comedy.

"I've always written stupid songs," he says. "But when I sent demos to the record companies, half the songs would be quite silly and the others would be straight-ahead rock songs so it was always like: 'We don't know what you are'.

"Eventually I decided to separate my silly stuff from my serious stuff. I thought that if I put a cabaret together with all my silly songs I could go back to serious songwriting later but once I started doing this I never stopped."

Minchin has gradually built up a loyal following in Britain since moving to London in 2006.

"Everything changed for us really quickly," he says. "We had a baby, suddenly I'm a comedian."

He lives in suburban London with his wife, Sarah, whom he first met when he was 17, and their 2-year-old daughter, Violet.

Minchin derives much of his material from his family including some very dark jokes about the possible death of his daughter, which cuts close to the bone.

"It spans the range from being completely honest to total nonsense," he says.

"Maybe some people have taboos where they pretend everything's okay. But once you have a kid, fear plays a huge role in your life. You look at your child and you go: 'I cannot bear the idea that something might happen to her.' That sort of love comes with terror and how we deal with it is to laugh at it, although some people get upset."

Minchin also draws on first-hand experience for his latest best piece Storm, a satirical savaging of a sanctimonious New Age hippie, whom he met at a friend's house.

"It's based on a dinner party that happened quite recently, where there was this woman who was into homeopathy," he notes.

"It's a conglomeration of several conversations but, of course, the point is that I say everything I would never say."

Minchin baulks at Storm's assertion that "you can't know anything, knowledge is merely opinion" and her misplaced faith in alternate healing.

"It's about science and how it is a superior mode of thought," he explains.

"It doesn't always work but the answer to bad science is not something else, it's better science ... It doesn't matter that people believe in things like star signs except when measles comes back after people stop vaccinating their children because of an autism scare that's been disproved ... "

Storm is presented in the form of a Jack Kerouac-style beat poem.

"It was a lot of work but I knew that if it didn't make people laugh or if it didn't have a really strong effect, I'd have to dump it. I'm using the form as a structure to do stuff that's funny within it but I'm not mocking or exploiting the genre. It's just like the music; I'm not mocking the music. My lyrics are silly but I'm using the songs to enhance the comedy; I'm not doing silly music."

Performance

Who: Australian comedian Tim Minchin, in Ready For This?
Plaudits: Perrier Award for Best Newcomer, Edinburgh 2005; Festival Director's Award, Melbourne 2005; Best Alternative Comedian, United States Comedy Arts Festival 2007.
Where and when: Auckland Festival Club, Lower NZI Room, Aotea Centre, March 5-8; see aucklandfestival.co.nz