Comedian Harley Breen was almost actor Harley Breen before he tried his hand at stand up ten years ago. He enjoyed it so much he thought he’d try to make a career out of it.
“I was shit at everything else,” he laughs. “I thought, ‘oh well this is a pretty good job,’ and if you play your cards right you get to tour around the country and the world making people laugh.”And that’s exactly what Breen’s been doing, performing at hundreds of venues and festivals all over Australia, the UK and Asia. He hasn’t just been making his audiences laugh but fellow comedians too, taking home the ‘Piece Of Wood’ Award at the 2011 Melbourne Comedy Festival.
“That was excellent. It’s a comic’s choice award so it’s a group of peers voting on it so in my opinion it’s the one that counts. You know if you’re making your colleagues laugh, you’re doing something right. I suppose the first thing is to make the audience laugh, isn’t it? But if you can make the comedians laugh then you’re on the right track. I was very humbled by the whole thing. There is a pretty great line up of people who have won it in the past so I was very awed by the accolade,” Breen says.
Don’t let the award’s name fool you. It’s actually a piece of wood. “That’s it. It does sound like you came last in the AFL, like you got the wooden spoon. [Comedian] Greg Fleet decided about 14 years ago now that the main award should have gone to another act, so he just picked up this bit of timber lying on the ground and handed it off and said, ‘there you go, there’s a piece of wood.’”
If you’re in need of a comedy fix, Breen is bringing the laughs to Brisbane as MC of the Melbourne Comedy Festival Roadshow. You can expect a mixed bag of comedians with different styles and levels of experience, including Matt Okine, Felicity Ward, Kate McLennan and Breen himself. “That’s what’s great about the roadshow, if you don’t like something just wait as there’ll be something else coming up. I get to MC it and I really enjoy that side of stand up. I like being able to connect the audience with the acts,” Breen says.
“It’s the cheapest best laugh in town. I think it’s a fantastic night. You can sit at home and watch television, which is pretty average at the best of times. You can watch fat people cry, or some person who’s not a chef cook food, or you can come and watch live entertainment.”
Breen will be performing excerpts from his recent solo show ‘Shape Up!’ which he says is loosely about body image, our obsession with image, and how he thinks we’ve lost sight of the important things. “To use a wanky word, I’m quite introspective. Anything that I really want to say, I will quite often use personal stories, stuff about my life and the people who surround me.”
The Melbourne Comedy Roadshow runs from Wednesday May 16 to Saturday May 19 at the Brisbane Powerhouse.
