It seems as though 22 year old Samuel Jonathan McMillan (AKA Sammy J) is destined for a career in comedy. A talented writer, musician and comedian and winner of the 2006 Melbourne Airport Best Newcomer Award at this year’s comedy festival, he still remained modest when I caught up with him recently to talk TV, law degrees, music, comedy and, most importantly, juice boxes.
Along with Shaun Micallef, Sammy’s major idols include Lano & Woodley. I grew up in school with a good mate, he says and we were basically trying to emulate [Lano & Woodley], every day. This behavior carried on through to law school. I did half my law degree and decided I did not want to do the other half, I was just spending all my time writing jokes and didn’t do a lot of studying. I made a lot of great mates there but I just didn’t have the dedication they did. I was like the Gollum of the law school. I’d steal notes from people and do no study and try and scrape by on 51% and I thought it would be more noble to cut it off.
After a gap year, Sammy knew he wanted to have a crack at comedy, so he arranged with Lou from Champagne Comedy (when it was previously run at the Armadale Hotel) to do his first gig. I introduced myself and said I’d like to do some songs on a piano, says Sammy. He misunderstood and thought I wanted to be the musical act at the start of the evening (before the comedy) and said, ‘OK, can you do about 20 minutes’, which for a first gig was quite unheard of. I freaked out and was too nervous to correct him so I said, ‘yeah, yeah, yeah sure.’ I turned up to the Armadale and the first gig that I ever did, was a twenty minute routine…it was pretty woeful but there are probably two jokes from that gig that I still use to this day. So from that he gave me another spot and so on…and that’s how I started out in comedy.
This multi-talented comedian embraces a variety of mediums in his work, from straightforward joke telling to the use of multi media and, notably, music. I definitely don’t consider myself a musician because I only learnt piano to do comedy, says Sammy. I was self-taught. I wanted to sing songs about my teachers at school and started teaching myself piano. ‘Musical comedian’ I’m quite happy with, but the shows I’m planning on doing are more about the performance so at the moment, if I wanted to be a bit arty-farty, I’d like to call myself a performer.
With songs covering a wide variety of topics, from using a voting booth with his girlfriend for something other than its intended purpose, to a hedgehog pretending to be a human, Sammy now only writes with one audience in mind. I think when I started out I was trying to please everybody and I just couldn’t do that because the things that I find funny are not always what other people find funny and vice versa, he says. So I took some advice from a Ross Noble interview and I remember him saying that he really took off when he started doing things that he found funny, not trying to emulate what other people found funny. So to be honest, my main audience now, is myself. If I’m enjoying myself, even if I’m having a terrible, terrible gig, there’s a large sense of inner peace. And all my best work so far have been things that I, myself have enjoyed, even though the risk is there that I’ll go a bit weird.
Sammy says he has plenty of horror stories from his time in comedy. About three weeks ago I was doing a gig for an old school friend who was organizing a charity event, and I was the comedian, he recalls. I got no introduction, I got nothing, they just go, ‘OK, you’re on now’. So I walk out into this St. Kilda pub, packed full of very, very drunk jocks, a lot of which used to bully me at school and basically got shouted down. I stopped half way through my first song and said ‘I think it would be better for everyone if I left the stage and let you all continue your night.’ I walked off stage, and it was a good tactic because everyone forgot about me then, whereas if I’d stayed for 10 minutes warbling away like a budgie I would have been remembered as that terrible comedian. Generally though when people start talking over you during the gig, you lose a lot of dignity.
This year, Sammy J took out the award for Best Newcomer at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. The winning show, Sammy J’s 55 Minute National Tour was his first solo show, and he describes the experience as “awesome.” However, he notes that this is a retrospective view, saying beforehand I had absolutely no idea what it would be like. I didn’t know whether I would lose money, whether I would lose my voice every show, whether I would want to do comedy again at all after the whole thing. So for me it was just so positive because I made my money back, I realised I could sing for an hour at a time and came out of it realising I did want to be a comedian.
Sammy has gained inspiration for his performances from comedians that many people today would not have heard of. Very generally, people I was into as a teenager were Noel Coward and Tom Lehrer, from the 1930’s and 1950’s respectively, who wouldn’t be considered funny these days by anyone’s standard but Noel Coward in particular had a really good mentality, says Sammy. He was always putting on shows, and providing the audience with an entertaining night, and ‘not boring them’ was his number one rule. That’s what I’m trying to bring into my comedy at the moment, so even if people don’t find it funny, if they’re still interested in what I’m doing, it’s a small win for me.
Sammy says that there is no typical process in writing a new song, (but wishes there was) and inspiration can be found anywhere you look. At the moment I’ve got about thirty melodies without any lyrics to go with them. One song from my show, Bird Interpreter, came when I was sitting at my window, looking out over the quad yard and saw two birds having sex and instantly wrote that song. Most people I think would say that with stand up material, the stuff that you write really quickly tends to be your best stuff. So the best songs have been ones that I’ve written really quickly whereas the worst ones are ones that I’ve laboured over have ended up being pretty shit.
Two Australian television shows, now defunct, Hey Hey it’s Saturday and Let Loose Live, have one very interesting thing in common. Sammy admits, I took my shirt off on each show and each show got axed a few weeks later. He defends his actions by saying, It just started one gig where I took my shirt off and got probably the biggest laugh of the night. So I thought, if you’ve got it flaunt it, or in my case, if you don’t have it, flaunt it. I’ve been thinking about kitting off before I get on stage and basically walking around not making any reference to it whatsoever.
Sammy was able to take away some valuable wisdom from his short-lived experience in the making of ‘Let Loose Live’ however. It was amazing, for 4 weeks I was heading up to channel 7 at 6am, getting made up, wearing costumes and mixing with people like Colin Lane who was a big hero of mine through high school. I remembered thinking at the time it was a dream. I took away that experience and it’s made me want to work on TV again. At the same time it also honed my ambitions as far as what I’d like to see on Australian television. After that experience I thought a lot about my favourite shows, such as Frontline, Lano and Woodley, The Office and Seinfeld, and what they all had in common was they all had very small groups of writers, and usually writers who were friends and who knew each other very well. A big problem with comedy on TV in the last few years seems to have been they’ve had a lot of writers, which can lead to a lack of cohesion in what you see on air. They treated me very well on the show and they let me write and perform all of my own material. Most people seem to agree that there was a very large cast and a very large group of writers, which is of course going to mean that you don’t have one single vision driving the show.
After the transition from Uni student to comedian, Sammy looks forward to having a career in comedy and all of the possibilities that come with that, but relishes the unknown. It really excites me the fact that I have no idea what I’ll be doing in five years, ten years, fifteen years, he says. Ultimately though to be making a living from performing, that would be a dream come true because it’s an amazing opportunity and I haven’t yet done that at all, I’ve just finished Uni and am now seeing how to go about it. And obviously beyond that, I look forward to having a wife, children, inner peace and tranquility.
Sammy cites a salient piece of advice, which has helped guide his career. Do what you find funny and either enjoy yourself or get off stage, he says, adding his own piece of advice for aspiring comedians. It obviously also helps to have an angle. I was quite lucky because when I turned up to my first gig at the Armadale I noticed all the comedians were drinking beer and I had no idea. All I had was a prima in my car, it was all I had because I didn’t drink beer. So I freaked out, ran downstairs, went into my car, got the box drink out, took it on stage and people chuckled when they saw it and because of that I’ve had a box drink at every single gig I’ve ever done. I find it funny that more people recognize me as the juice box guy rather than the piano guy. So I think a gimmick doesn’t go astray.
Seeing the golden opportunity there, Sammy has already approached a juice box company. I wrote a very detailed proposal to… I will name them – Just Juice, before the festival, explaining who I was and that I was endorsing their product every single night and asking for sponsorship and they shot me down and said they were not interested and I have now made it my life long ambition to make Just Juice come crawling back, because I am only drinking Coles Farmland variety until the day they come back.
*You can catch the return season of “Sammy J’S 55 Minute National Tour ” from the 22nd -25th Junes at The Butterfly Club, 204 Bank Street, South Melbourne, For bookings go to The Butterfly Club website or (03) 9690 2000