Mel Buttle has spent most of her life being emabarrassed or apologising for doing embarrassing stuff.
You might think success — a column in The Courier Mail, a regular segment on triple j, a hit podcast with Patience Hodgson — would make life easier for Buttle. But as this interview proves, you'd be wrong.
The show's called How Embarrassment, and it's about your struggles with embarrassment, but it seems like everything's coming up Mel at the moment. What do you have to be embarrassed about?
Oh, plenty. Just the other day, I was running – well, I wasn't really running, I was just standing still on the curb waiting to cross the road, and my feet just came out from under me like a newborn foal. Now I'm just covered in a scab at age 30. Stuff just happens to me, I don't know why. I always just do embarrassing things.
Do you think you're more prone to embarrassment than the average human?
Oh, yeah. Things happen to me more than normal people. I think it's because I'm an only child, maybe, and I never went to stuff with other kids for ages. So I feel like I'm behind the eight ball with social stuff. I just never know what to do. I suppose embarrassment sums up my life quite well. Most of my life has been spent being embarrassed or apologising for doing embarrassing stuff.
I had an undercut in high school because I wanted to look like a rapper, like I was in Salt N Pepa. No one mentioned that that's not cool, but now I know. Now, 15 years later, I've worked out I was not cool. There's so much shame, you know?
Sure. You mentioned you were an only child – did you have any concept of embarrassment before you started to socialise with other kids?
I only realised how embarrassing I was when the cool girls at primary school pointed it out to me. I suppose I didn't really care before then. I thought it was cool to ride around on my bike with my pet chicken in a basket. I thought I was being really cool and showing off to everyone that I had a chicken. Now I realise that was quite weird. So I think it was when school started, when girls with names like Natalie and Kelly would come up and say, 'oh my god, Mel Buttle, what are you doing? That is so embarrassing!'
There were so many things... my dad would make my lunch and wrap it up in wet newspaper to keep it cool, but everyone else had nice lunch boxes with Barbie on them. That's when I started to realise I was perhaps a little bit different.
Does this run in the family? Are your parents particularly prone to embarrassment?
I come from a long line of embarrassers. My dad, at my recent birthday party, he got up in front of my friends and he tried to get 'crunk'. He'd obviously been watching a bit of Video Hits. He got up and he said, 'I'm gonna get crunk!' He was doing this embarrassing dancing, and I just... you know when your chest hurts from embarrassment? When you're actually cringing, when your muscles are actually trying to make themselves smaller, to make you smaller so people can't see you?
Yes.
That happens a lot.
So your dad's not prone to being embarrassed, he just has a gift for embarrassing you.
Yes! Oh, he's the best at embarrassing me. He's, like, number one. He came to pick me up from parties in high school and he'd wear his dressing gown and slippers. He's ex-military, so if I was one minute late, he would just walk into the party, to try to teach me to be out the front in time. I don't think he feels embarrassment. But he hands it out, in spades, to me.
He's obviously a topic that comes up fairly frequently in your comedy, but he's not even embarrassed by that? He wears it proudly?
Oh, god... see, this is his problem. He doesn't realise... I'll tell stories on stage about him that are clearly only funny because he's an idiot, and he just laps it up. He loves the attention. Last year at my Brisbane Comedy Festival show, he came and saw it, and then afterwards he got the little flyers and posters and stood out front of the door of the show and signed them for people. He was there going, 'I'm Barry! That's me, I'm the one from the show!'
God! It's so embarrassing! He sees himself as the star. I'm like, 'dad, I'm making fun of you, your favourite food is mullet, I'm mocking you'. But he doesn't care.
Has this embarrassment situation gotten easier lately? You had a big victory with your show at the Sydney Fringe Festival, you're all over triple j, you're everywhere at the moment. Has success changed Mel Buttle?
No. No, no, no, no. First of all, let me be clear: There is no success. I still have my pyjamas on right now.
That depends how you define success, doesn't it? Some people would probably love to be in a position where they could be sitting around in their pyjamas at midday. To them, you've scored a victory.
That's true, I suppose sitting around in my own filth is a victory. But no, it hasn't changed me. I'm exactly the same. That's why I can't understand when people see me and they're like, 'oh, I heard you on triple j', and they want to shake my hand and stuff. I just feel like the eight-year-old girl who's got a Legionnaire’s cap on on sports day. I'm just like, 'oh, thanks...' I don't know why they want to talk to me. I'm like, 'guys, didn't Natalie and Kelly tell you I'm uncool?'
It seems like you've chosen a particularly strange profession, then. Essentially, people just sort of look at you and listen to you all the time.
Yeah, I know! Yeah, I've worked that out! I think I picked it because it's the thing I find hardest in the world. Well, no, the thing I find hardest in the world is long division, but this is pretty close. I was chronically shy when I was young, and I didn't talk to anyone I didn't know until I was about six. Now I do it for a living.
I feel like I accidentally fell into it, I don't feel like I ever really made active choices. This isn't my dream. My dream is to sit at home and cook things and eat them. I don't know how I got into this position where I have to go and talk to people in pubs and stuff. But here we are!
Yeah. It sounds like you weren't a fan of the cool girls at school, but they don't get much cooler than Patience Hodgson. How did your podcast with her, The Minutes, come about?
Patience is very cool, yes. She had just moved back from living in New York, and their album was out, and I met her when I was filling in on ABC Radio. I had her in for an interview to help promote her album. Of course, we were just instant BFFs. We just had so much in common! We both loved Brisbane and wearing pants from Millers and making cakes.
I didn't have much on during the days — I've got nothing on during the days — and she really didn't have much on at all because she was just getting ready to tour. She was like, 'hey, do you wanna do something together?' And I was like, 'yes, I really wanna do something, but what could we do? Could we film funny YouTube videos?' And she was like, 'no, let's make a podcast'. It was Patience's idea. She's the brains behind it.
I think she had a podcast previously by herself, called Patience's Telling Show, where she just used to ring people up and tell them the prices of things in catalogues. Not as successful as The Minutes, I must say. So we went to her house to see if it would work, and we just sat down at her table and did a practice one. We just talked to each other and told stories that we thought might be interesting, and listened back to it, and we were like, 'yeah, I reckon people would probably like that'. And then The Minutes was born!
Patience seems like quite a confident person. She doesn't seem like she would be prone to embarrassment, at least not on the Mel Buttle scale. Has any of that confidence rubbed off on you?
I think so. I think I'm a bit in awe of Patience sometimes, and her boldness. She literally does whatever she wants to do. She wears whatever she wants. I found these long floral pants, and I sent her a picture in the shop, like, 'do you think I could maybe wear these?' She was like, 'hells yes, Buttle, wear them, get 'em!' Then she bought a pair of pants that are similar, and now we sort of wear them together. So I've learnt from her not to care what people think. She's really like... she's exactly what she's like. There's no smoke and mirrors with her. What you see is exactly what you get.
Awesome. Has doing this show – getting up there and talking about your embarrassment – has it been therapeutic at all? Do you feel like you've learned something?
I've learned that when you air out what you think are your deepest, darkest, most embarrassing secrets that you would never want anyone to know; when you say them and people laugh at them, it is healing, in a wanky Dr Phil way. It's kind of nice. It's like, 'oh, these people probably would not have given me noogies on the head in primary school'. You know? It's like, 'you guys are alright!'
It's really good to take something you think is embarrassing and then just say it, because it's like... it's like sharing it takes its power away. Not that I get embarrassed in a negative way, like, 'oh, I just wanna kill myself', but I have hidden all the photos of me from before the age of about 25. You will struggle to find a shot of me under 25.
What I've realised is that other people have embarrassing stuff too, even people I think are super cool. A few people came up to me in Sydney after the show and said, 'yeah, I really loved the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles too, and this is my Michelangelo doona cover I painted myself!' And I'm like, 'wow, that is embarrassing'. So I like when other people come and tell me their embarrassing stuff. I think we can all cringe about the '90s together.
Mel Buttle plays the following dates:
Tue Mar 5 - Sun Mar 10 — Brisbane Comedy Festival @ Brisbane Powerhouse
Thu Mar 14 - Sat Mar 16 — Sydney Comedy Festival @ Sydney Comedy Store
Tue Mar 19 — Canberra Comedy Festival Gala @ Australian National University
Fri Mar 22 — Albion Comedy Club
Thu Mar 28 - Sun Apr 21 — Melbourne International Comedy Festival @ Victoria Hotel
