There are two Heath Franklins.
On the phone in Sydney, there is Heath Franklin, suburban dad getting his kids ready for their first week of the school year.
And then there’s the Heath Franklin who tours the country and performs his famed comedy impression of the late Melbourne criminal Chopper.
They’re two different sides, and two he hopes to keep separate.
“I’ve done pretty well keeping Chopper hidden from them,” he says. “There’d be nothing worse than my kids getting caught swearing and punching someone and then it’s like, ‘Who’s your dad? Oh, the Chopper guy. That explains it’.”
Heath Franklin has performed as Chopper for 20 years, beginning with stage shows as part of The 3rd Degree and blowing up on television on Channel Ten sketch show ‘The Ronnie Johns Half Hour’. Now, Heath Franklin’s Chopper returns to the Adelaide Fringe Festival with his latest show, ‘Not Here To F… Spiders’.
The new show is Heath’s return to the stage as Chopper, last performing as the character in 2020. “I managed to get a bit of the Fringe just before the world ended,” he says, referring to the COVID pandemic.
During lockdowns, Heath continued working from home, recording videos as Chopper. However, the kids also being at home made keeping Chopper hidden from the kids a tricky task.
“During the pandemic, I’d be at home recording a video, and they’d be misbehaving. I’d have to come out in full-attire and be like, ‘Shut up! Dad is trying to work!’
“No, I didn’t put the voice on,” he laughs. “That’d be too weird. It’s not like some sort of weird, psychotic ‘Mrs Doubtfire’ situation where I dress as Chopper to discipline my kids and then act like a normal dad for birthdays or whatever.”
Once comedy returned to the stage, Heath continued his hiatus from performing as Chopper live. Last year, he toured a show to festivals, telling jokes as himself in a show called ‘Out Of Character’.
“It was something I needed to get off my chest a bit,” he says. “I also felt that Chopper started becoming me treading on my own footsteps. So I took a year off and did a show as me and wrote some jokes as me and whinged about my life. Now I’m really enjoying going back into the character. It feels kind of fresh and new again. I think I’m going to keep doing that as well because doing shows as me is really good for the Chopper character as well.”
Heath Franklin’s return as Chopper is titled ‘Not Here To F… Spiders’. It’s a title he has chosen to show that the character’s return to Adelaide means business, so keep the kids away.
“The title has a good attitude about it,” he says. “ I wanted something that was like, ‘We’re not here to muck around’. It’s all about the nonsense that happens on social media that everyone buys into. I think that there’s a lot of noise in modern life that we pay too much attention to, while we ignore all of the important stuff. This is Chopper lining up all the really spicy topics everyone is talking about and trying to get the last word.
“We’ve gone through a phase of comedy where everyone is after an emotional experience with a comedy show, but Chopper’s not in the position to do that because he’s a sociopath – he has no emotions. There’s no touching reveal while some earnest music plays in this show,” he laughs.
Heath Franklin’s Chopper plays The Box at The Garden Of Unearthly Delights (Adelaide Fringe), 20-25 February.
