Interview with Dave Thornton
This is the second year in the festival for Dave Thornton and this year sees him joining forces with “Troy Kinne”, Tom Siegert and Monty Franklin to bring us “Eye Candy”. “Eye Candy” will see the boys interspersing standup routines with crowd interactions and videos, videos which Dave describes as an “introduction to the whole thing, with our own little input of cheese, and then little intro’s to all of us…we’re just trying to have some fun with the crowd.”
Dave says his experience in the Comedy Festival last year “was a huge learning curve for me, for just going to see show, seeing how the whole festival works…for a guy that’s only been doing it for eighteeen months… [I] wanna just see great comics perform and…just see what it’s all about… I do wanna put on a good show by all means… but I also wanna see great comedians, you know that’s what the festival’s all about.”
Although having gigged seriously in Melbourne for only eighteen months, Dave also gigged sporadically overseas for a few years. “I did it round the traps in Dublin, did a bit in London, All sounds very fancy smancy…but it was really cool though, you got to travel around a bit, you got to learn humour in different countries, you can’t do tram jokes in Dublin, they just die. When I travelled it was so sporadic, like you’d do a bit, whether it was good bad or indifferent you live off it for three months, either in depression or elation, and then you’d go back and it was fun, it was cool. I liked being introduced into comedy in that way, rather than straight away going to the grind, it was more just fun every time. And then when I got back to Melbourne I thought maybe I’d give it a crack, and realised…the drunken backpacker audiences are way different to sober, intelligent [audiences]...people don’t even have to be intelligent, just sober. I reckon that’s when I started with it pretty much from scratch, I got to have fun with it overseas, and now it’s like I’ve probably gotta go to school.”
The name of his current festival show, “Eye Candy”, seems to make Dave a little wary. “When Troy said ‘oh it’s Eye Candy’, ... I was ‘I hope people understand it’s ironic.’” So who, of the group really is the ‘eye candy’? “Monty’s a ladies man, he is the eye candy,” says Dave. “Monty’s the man ladies want…you how like Ringo was the talentless one…the lack of talent to Ringo was what good looks are to Monty.”
Cop an eye full of the promo image for Eye Candy (above), a kind of Wiggles meets Boogie Nights number, and you can decide for yourself just who is the eye candy. While you’re at it, check out Dave’s moustache, since shaved but still legendary in the Melbourne comedy community for the brief time it was with us. “You wanna bleed for you’re art,” Dave says of his now missing mo, “I think Justin Hamilton said it best…he said ‘why’d you shave it off?’, I said ‘because my girlfriend wasn’t giving me sex’, he said ‘yeah but the comedy world has lost so much more’.”
If you wanna catch Dave, Troy, Tom and Monty in “Eye Candy” check out Eye Candy