'that "yeaaah" Is Me Not Being Able To Think Quick Enough'

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday November 4, 2006

LENNY ANN LOW

DAVE HUGHES TALKS TO LENNY ANN LOW

ANYONE WITH A spare few minutes can share a repulsive personal experience with Dave Hughes. Australia's most popular, and seemingly most unflappable, comedian appears on YouTube in a short video in which he rips off the long-dead, black nail from his right big toe.

It's gruesome, quick and funny and it symbolises Hughes's skill at baring the not-always-painless minutiae of his life to keep a lot of people entertained. Compared with some of the frankness for which he has become famous on TV, radio and stage, the toenail video is fairly mild.

Hughes, or Hughesy as he is more commonly known, is an all-Aussie champion at telling the truth. His drawn-out accent, laid-back delivery and wide-eyed, toothy facial expression have become synonymous with an endearing comedy of frank admission, crushing personal embarrassment and plain-spoken observation. Being honest, he has discovered, is funny.

"It might paint you in a bad light or a pathetic light or whatever," Hughes says. "But the audience's laughter is the acceptance of it, the acceptance of the fact that I'm pathetic and they're laughing because they know what it's like themselves."

In the flesh, Hughes is far from pathetic. A confident though somewhat distracted figure, he has just arrived from Melbourne after rising before dawn to co-host Nova FM's daily breakfast show. He's worrying about his diet - "from today I'm only going to eat fresh" - and he is wolfing down his lunch of steamed fish and salad in between answering questions. Tomorrow he's doing the radio show from Sydney because he is booked for a corporate gig in the city and in half an hour he is due at ABC TV's Ultimo studios to record one of the last episodes of The Glass House with no idea what he will say in his opening monologue.

"I do this every week," he complains. "I'm a terrible procrastinator. If I wasn't here I'd be procrastinating somewhere at the ABC and getting annoyed with myself about it."

Surely this is not the typical behaviour of the relaxed, no-worries Hughes we're accustomed to, the amiable comic with the grinning, unblinking stare who pulls laughs simply by uttering his trademark "yeaaah"?

"Well, yes," he says. "That 'yeaaah' is me not being able to think quick enough. I'm wrestling with trying to think of something to say. I really am. And making noise until I can find an appropriate sentence. That's giving away some of the magic there."

Hughes's procrastination extends to spending money. He could, if he wanted, buy a nice house or even a car now that Holden has taken back the free one they famously gave him as part of an advertising deal. He just reckons buying things takes up too much energy. "I do wander around and look at houses," he says. "But I don't buy them. I could buy one, if I could just work out my tax situation."

His tax situation is about to become more complex, after the ABC announced last week it was axing The Glass House to make way for new shows. Hughes says he was "annoyed". "We were hoping it wasn't so," he says. "They told us weeks ago but we were thinking surely they were going to change their minds; we just didn't want to believe it."

Now, he will focus on other work after the ABC airs the final show on November 29. "I'll keep doing stand-up, I'll do other jobs. It's not woe-is-me-I'm-unemployed, but I just liked doing the show."

It is nearly 15 years since Hughes's first attempt at stand-up comedy failed dreadfully on the stage of a Perth nightclub. No one laughed that night but he went back the following week and got the audience chuckling by describing the terrors of the first gig. Since then, the 36-year-old former abattoir worker from Warrnambool, in Victoria, has developed the sort of rock-hard comedy persona a character actor would cherish. Does he ever feel constrained by the guise?

"I've never consciously thought about it," he says. "I never started off and thought: 'I'm going to be this certain character.' I just went on stage to tell stories, basically from my own life. I do what I do without ever thinking about it at all."

Occasionally, his unaffected approach to comedy has raised eyebrows. Hughes says his sometimes alarmingly honest material about his personal life has caused his fiancee, Holly Ife, to "cut up".

"She's a funny one," he says. "She has a very, very high embarrassment threshold so she's pretty open herself. Give her a couple of drinks and we'll be out at a party and she'll say stuff and I'll go, 'Can you just back off? I don't think they need to know about that part of our sex lives.' So she can embarrass me, too."

Hughes and Ife, a journalist, whom he met four years ago at a Melbourne bar, will marry on New Year's Eve. Hughes proposed while the pair were driving along a dirt road during a holiday in the outback this year.

"My fiancee is working very hard," he says, smiling into the distance. "She said to me yesterday, in fact, that I will never have any idea how hard she's worked for this wedding. I can't argue with that."

Hughes is in charge of organising the music for the wedding reception. And he's getting stressed. "At the moment we've got a duo booked, a husband and wife, and I'm thinking about getting a bigger band. But I don't want to tell the duo. I don't know how I'm going to tell the duo."

In true Hughes style, he's concerned about letting people down and trying to do the right thing. "I went out to the duo's house in the outer suburbs of Melbourne and they performed in the lounge room for me because you're meant to see them before the day," he says. "It was weird because you've got to try and give them some energy and it was just me and a guy from the radio show watching them in their lounge room."

He says having children is on the horizon but confesses he has never been one to yearn for fatherhood. For years, his stand-up shows and TV appearances have featured the following joke about a discussion with his girlfriend: "She said to me, 'Can we have kids in two years?' And I said, 'Oh, I don't know about that but we can have fish and chips tonight."'

He is sure, though, that he'll be a great dad. "I'll be good, yeah," he says. "I'm pretty confident. I think [that] though I stress internally I would teach my child not to stress. I would teach them just to relax and enjoy themselves."

Stress, it seems, is a big part of Hughes's life. He may look like the most unruffled man on Australian TV and stage but his working life is demanding and regularly split between cities. Weekdays are spent co-hosting breakfast radio with Kate Langbroek in Melbourne; most weeks he flies to Sydney to record episodes of The Glass House and during the AFL season he hosts Channel Ten's Before the Game on Saturday nights for the southern states. He fills in the gaps with stand-up, annually selling out his season at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, carrying out extensive live tours and performing the odd corporate gig. No wonder he confesses he's always trying to be Zen.

"I do get stressed," he says. "I don't look stressed but apparently I'm grinding my teeth in my sleep, which my girlfriend told me about."

When Hughes talked about this on radio, a therapist rang up and then came into the radio station to give him an inner-mouth massage.

"She wore a glove and massaged the back of my mouth and it hurt a lot," he says. "She claims I was carrying a lot of stress in my mouth. Before that, there was an osteopath and he gave me a massage on my neck and he said my muscles on my neck were as tight as anyone he's ever massaged. He claims I'm carrying a lot of stress."

His delivery might be laid-back but when he performs in theatres, Hughes stands ramrod straight at the edge of the stage, rocking gently backwards and forwards with one, barely moving, arm holding the microphone.

"I know, I know," he says. "I don't know I do it at the time but people tell me that I do it. I don't know why. I'm stiff as a board."

The solution, Hughes speculates, is a return to daily meditation. He first tried it in 1993 after a visit to a Buddhist monastery. Having just started stand-up he found he could calm his mind by setting an alarm for 20 minutes and staring at the wall.

"I look calm, generally, and I speak calmly," he says. "But I'm a thinker. I think a lot. And I will obsess over rubbish. If I've got a show on sale in Sydney I'll look at the sales every day. If my management don't send me the sales for that day I'll think, 'Oh well, must have been a shit day.' And it probably was."

Sometimes, someone will be funnier than him on a TV or live show, or he'll notice only the empty seats at his gigs and he will brood over that. "I am generally happy but there's times when you're not," he says. "And it's ridiculous."

Dave Hughes performs Hughesy Rides Again at the Enmore Theatre on November 11 and 12.

© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald

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