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Planet mirth's darker side
Email Print Normal font Large font Anthony Morgan
Photo: Peter Mathew
March 17, 2007

LIKE some Dorian Gray naif who has reneged on his pact with the
devil, Anthony Morgan suffers from a serious need to tell the truth.
Not in a joyous, evangelical kind of way but in a weary resignation
to one of the self-imposed contingencies of a healthy mind.

The theory could help explain the comedian's chosen exile in rural
southern Tasmania, two hours drive from Hobart and a long way from
his old stomping grounds of Melbourne, where he was one of the city's
comic royalty in the 1990s.

"The minute you start being dishonest you've got to have a really,
really good memory. But I don't get bothered as much down here," he
says with a snort.

Morgan's slow retreat from the public eye into a poster boy for
the "Where is he now?" club came by virtue of a very public emotional
breakdown after the end of his marriage in 1996.

That year was his annus horribilis. He was forced to live in his car
for several months. The focus for his political anger, Jeff Kennett,
romped it in to his second term as Victorian premier, and Fitzroy,
Morgan's beloved football team, moved to Brisbane.

Ever the professional, he charted his own destruction in shows with
titles such as Sad, Lonely, Bitter, Broke, Guilty and Suicidal.
Eventually the public blood-lettings were no longer enough. The pain
had gone from marketable commodity to liability. He shocked fans by
announcing his retirement from comedy at a 1998 gig.

Nine years on it's hard to decide how much of the famous Morgan
eccentricity is performance and how much is the result of random gear
shifts in his freewheeling brain. The publicity material for Sackful
of Bullfrogs, his latest show for the Melbourne International Comedy
Festival, focuses on the less-exalted chapter of his biography and
the overlap between artistic genius and madness.

"Some feel that somewhere in southern Tasmania there is a shambling
husk of a man tending his daffodils with deep sad eyes, more often
than not dwelling in memory rather than the real world around him,"
it says.

Last year's publicity guff offered this: "He has not been sighted for
some time. Some say he has been in Tasmania. Others say he has been
locked up — where he belongs."

Like that of his heroes Lenny Bruce and Tony Hancock, Morgan's comedy
is an art built on an unstable cliff-top. Unlike the families of his
heroes, his had none of the instability or the entertainment
background that would signpost a detour into stand-up.

He grew up in suburban Glenroy with two brothers and a sister. His
father was a glazier. The family isn't close: "We're flung all over
the place. A fairly typical family that moved in from the country,
always struggled and clawed its way to the middle class, which was f--
---- brilliant."

Like many bright kids, he enjoyed learning but got into trouble at
school, eventually being kicked out of Oak Park High in form five
(year 11). "I can't remember why. I was fairly unimpressed with
school but I always did well." He enrolled in an electronics
course "where they were teaching us on computers you actually walked
inside. They weren't as powerful as an iPod and the teachers kept
telling us that what we learned today would be redundant next week."

The comedy bug hit at age 20 at legendary venue Le Joke. "I was
tricked into it by filthy university students," he says. "My first
time on stage was terrible. I was shaking like a leaf and a woman
heckled me and — oh, it was pathetic — I said in the smallest voice
possible, 'shut up'. The audience laughed at that. That bit was
great; I was interested in why the rest of it didn't work and that
was the idea of the room, to find out how to do it. It's so horrible
when you get it wrong that you try never, ever to do it wrong again."

There was always something of Chaplin's Little Tramp about Morgan.
The crumpled face and the manner of the wide-eyed ingenue that hid an
incendiary political rage. That his seedtime came in the early '90s,
when comedians were feted as the new rock stars, helped propel his
invective to new heights. "In my twisted little mind (comedy) was
art. It was going to be my noble contribution to society."

He was run out of Mallacoota for his anti-Kennett schtick but city
audiences were more receptive. In hindsight he sees it as a waste of
time. "I thought I was doing something and I wasn't doing anything. I
wasn't doing anything if I was telling people who already know things
the things they already know. I'd had a yell about it and they
said 'Yes!' and we all went home."

Now he believes it's actions rather than words that count. "It's not
enough to know about something and to go 'tsk, tsk, tsk'. That's not
helping. That's just knowing."

He has the perfect escape clause from his own philosophy, however: "I
hate everybody equally. I'm an inclusionist."

At the height of his fame in the mid-90s he was a lovably scruffy yet
mercurial presence on Hey Hey It's Saturday, Denton, Tonight Live and
Good News Week.

Andrew Denton hand-picked Morgan to perform a two-minute live cross
on Denton each week after seeing him perform at the Prince Patrick
Hotel's stand-up night. "Lots of people were telling me, you've got
to see this guy. He was doing his famous pissing on Jeff Kennett
routine. He was like the counter-culture Paul Hogan. He had this
blond hair and scruffy surfer looks, but he'd stand on stage hurling
out razor blades."

Morgan's exploits on Denton included him hitting a golf ball off the
Rialto, declaring his love for Kylie Minogue as he threatened to jump
from the top of a climbing wall, and getting the face of Lenny Bruce
tattooed on his back.

"It was the most fabulously unpredictable television," says
Denton. "You wouldn't do it with anyone but Anthony because he was
just so good. One week it was shambles and the next week he would be
jaw-dropping. We never knew if we were going to get a car wreck or
the Grand Prix."

The energy that made Morgan thrum with crazed intensity turned
inwards when his life went to pieces. His last appearances on Good
News Week showed he was hanging by a thread. "I remember being
practically psychotic on the chemicals my brain was producing," he
says. "I'm still not sure if I was ill; I do know that it was
intolerable. I was in not very good shape. People tried to treat it
with drugs, but drugs weren't the answer. Unfortunately everything I
medicated with was alcohol. I had a good go at controlling it by
drinking. People kept hiring me when I was completely not right and I
kept doing it because I'd run out of money. It was a traumatic time
for everyone concerned and I remember very little of it."

Eventually, sometime in 2000, he moved to Tasmania without telling
anyone. He visited a friend "equally as mad and as anti-social" whom
he stayed with for a while before renting a farmhouse and helping a
shipwright down the road repair old timber ships. "I came to Tasmania
because I was so crook on the mainland. My mind wasn't working in a
way that was tolerable in a city. It was a gentler environment with a
lot more room to be crazy, to be away from people. Being away from
Melbourne has made me a nicer person."

He shares his Tasmanian hideaway with his artist and gardener partner
of four years and their three dogs. There are some chooks out the
back and, while their home is not on a huge block, they grow most of
their food. Melancholy bluegrass music plays in the background and
Morgan breaks off mid-thought to remark happily that the resident
swallow hawk appears to have found a girlfriend.

Is he happy? "Yeah!" he says with the first palpable enthusiasm after
an obviously painful retelling of past troubles.

While comedy has largely receded into the background as a part-time
affair that helps pay the bills, music has become his new love. His
latest band, Los Capitanes, is a stripped-back country three-piece.
Morgan sings and plays guitar and they intend to record an album soon.

Age music writer Patrick Donovan has described his songs as "heart-
rending, 'I've drunk 100 beers and don't know why my wife's making me
sleep on the couch with the dog' George Jones-style country songs".
(Sample lyric: " I got some cheap red wine/And some homegrown
weed/The shape we're both in/It's all we're gonna need.")

He makes his own instruments. He's getting good at building things,
such as the chook shed. He and his partner are fixing up an old
car. "Nothing's impossible for us at the moment. Life's just a bit
more on my own terms. And not having comedy overwhelm my life … I'm
aware now of what I really need to do with myself in order to be
happy. Which is grow things and eat them, essentially."

As if becoming repulsed by his own Good Life-style picture of a
contented middle-aged man immersed in the mechanics of organic
farming and compost toilets, he embarks on a diatribe against
Tasmania's population of ferals.

"I'm a bit grumpy that the front line of the environmental movement
is seen as dreadlocked idiots. You see them on TV banging their
friggin' drums and playing flutes. I'd tear the forests down myself
if it was going to get rid of them."

The material might wind up in A Sackful Of Bullfrogs. It might not.
The name was chosen because he liked the phrase and the festival
organisers needed to print something in the program. The rest he'll
figure out later.

The trademark anarchy of his shows is a matter of necessity rather
than design, he says. "It's lack of memory that stops me from being
overly dishonest and evil. That stops me from scripting anything too
tightly because I can't bloody remember it anyway. So if I just have
big stepping stones then I can work out the way to get there every
night. Sometimes, as some audiences will tell you, we get to the
second big stepping stone and just sit there all night."

He isn't entirely unhappy about returning from his island utopia of
vegetables and sparrow hawks to Melbourne for the month of April. Now
that he isn't worried about being overwhelmed by anger or fear,
comedy is back on his own terms. Besides, a man needs to make a
living. "I'm 46 now and I've done nothing else. I have a degree in
fixing ancient computers. Probably Fiji hasn't even got them now. I
don't know where I'd have to go."

The Melbourne International Comedy Festival runs from April 4 to 29.

Larissa Dubecki is an Age writer.