One of the mainstays of comedy on the small screen over recent years, Corinne Grant has worked her way into the national consciousness via that medium. But hers is a history that combines stand up, acting and writing, encompassing not just TV, but radio and the live stage as well.
Although known predominantly for her television roles, Corinne gigged around Melbourne and in festivals extensively before concentrating on TV. Having known Tim Ross and Merrick Watts (Merrick and Rosso) whilst at University, Corinne almost fell into comedy by accident. “Tim was doing a bit of comedy at the time. I thought I’ll just give it a go”, she says. “I don’t think I’d even really seen stand up before. I thought I’d just give it a go.” Her early, incidental foray into stand up generated a career which led to a stint in stand up which spanned several years and, following this, a successful career in television.
The 2006 Melbourne Comedy Festival marked Corinne Grant’s return to stand up for the first time in five years with her show “Faking It”. “It was great.” says Corinne of the experience, “I worked really hard in the lead up to it, made sure I had a lot of gigs under my belt before I started…it’s just an expediential thing of getting back into it, more of a j curve than it was the first time. I did start pretty much at the level I started at when I first started doing stand up. My first few gigs were pretty horrendous and then it slowly got better over time. You just learn more quickly second time around I think.”
Her move back to live stand up has been a happy one for Corinne. “I love it” she says. “As opposed to having a three minute segment where you’ve gotta squash everything in. I’ve now got fifty five minutes where I can stand on stage and tell the audience whatever I like and do whatever I want. And I can be myself and own and control it. It’s my voice.”
“I got sick of doing stand up,” she says of her first years on the circuit. “I never really had a passion for doing it the first time around. I was just doing it …this time around it’s been a much more serious enterprise…and I’m really enjoying it so I’m a lot more obsessive about it…I’m a better comedian for it I think.”
Like several other notable performances in this year’s festival, Corinne’s show “Faking It” was heavily autobiographical. “That’s more where my material comes from”, she remarks, “there’s a little bit of observational stuff, but not much…I’ve got a weird family, they’re kind of kooky…and you know I’ve had some spectacularly kooky boyfriends…I had two boyfriends who were utter, utter, utter arseholes, but in a hilarious way.”
Corinne is taking “Faking It” to Edinburgh this year, under a new name. “Faking It” is also the name of a BBC show, so to avoid confusion Corinne has changed the name of the show to “Nice Friendly Lady Hour”. Her first time in Edinburgh, Corinne is looking forward to the experience, although it looms a little daunting. “It’s just that fear of the unknown thing,” she says. “I think once I start it’ll be fine…Everyone keeps telling me I’m gonna get torn apart, I’m just ‘what, what, I’m not gonna get torn apart, Jesus I’ll be fine’.”
With a background in acting, Corinne says that this is an area she’d like to get back into but notes that “it’s a difficult country, Australia, to convince that comedians can act.”
“Not every comedian can act” she adds, “but there’s a strong history of them being able to do it. Timing. Timing translates to everything. Acting’s as much about timing as comedy is, whether it’s dramatic or funny. Timing’s about finding the truth of what you’re saying. Delivery as well. The reason I started doing stand up in the first place was because I wanted to focus really natural delivery ‘cause you can say the same joke a thousand times but it has to sound like the first time you said it…comedy’s really good for getting that natural delivery working which is what you need to be an actor as well…there is a lot of cross over.”
With over ten years experience in the industry Corinne does admit to experiencing some degree of nerves. “Sometimes, all the time, you need that certain level of nervousness anyway ‘cause if you walk out there thinking it’s gonna be a walk in the park then you don’t have the right energy and it tends to fall flat.” Although, she adds, mental discipline is integral in controlling those nerves. “I don’t often get really worked up about it. I don’t get nervous back stage or anything like that and if you start getting really worked up and going ‘shit they’re gonna hate me’...you just have to shut that bit of your brain down…you have to walk out there feeling fine, you have to walk out there in control…an audience is like a dog, they can smell fear and if you’re giving that off then you’re fucked.”
Corinne also has directing experience in live comedy which straddles both sides of the coin, directing Terri Psiakis in Terri’s 2005 show “Available” and then drawing on the experience of Brad Oakes to direct her in “Faking It”. “With Terri it was just sitting down and just working through her material and finding a logical order to it,” she says. ” It’s more dramaturgy really, or script advisory or something like that and that’s what I got from Brad as well, which is really good for me ‘cause I do tend to be quite verbose, so he was really good at going through my stuff saying “that sentence doesn’t lead anywhere, that sentence isn’t needed”, and just getting rid of the superfluous words…it’s also someone to bounce off too, you just sit down to lunch and start verballing and go ‘oh, that can be a routine’.”
When I asked Corinne about her influences I was admittedly visibly surprised when she listed Kerri-Anne Kennerly amongst them. “People always balk when I say that”, Corinne noted at my reaction, but added, “she was the first woman I saw on Australian television …who was quite happy to be a dickhead, which made her a normal human being and made her really endearing…she’d get into water or she’d get a pie thrown in her face or she do the Macarena, and it’s all that kind of stuff that made her normal and that’s why she’s still on television now, why she’s so adored by people…there is something really there to be said for walking out there as a normal person and allowing yourself to be normal, allowing yourself to be a bit of a dickhead, allowing yourself to fail.”
That being said television can often polarise an audience. On the plus side TV creates a recognisable profile for a comedian. On the down side it can produce a whole group of people who loathe said comedian. “I don’t give a shit” says Corinne in regard to the latter. “You know there are so many more important things in the world to get worked up about than hating someone on television. Get a fucking life, read a book, worry about what’s happening to children in detention, worry about the industrial relation laws, don’t worry about how Jessica Rowe laughs for god’s sake. People like that, I could not give a shit about. If that’s what they’re passionate about then don’t come and see my show, I don’t want them there. Most people who lay down twenty bucks to come and see me though, want to have a good time.”
“Television is what it is” she adds. “At the end of the day you can’t get too worked up about it, and really at the end of the day you’re not performing to millions of people you’re performing to two people sitting at home in their lounge room…so it’s actually a very personal experience doing television.”
Corinne has become known in recent years as one of the mainstays of television shows like “The Glasshouse” and “Rove Live”, departing the latter show at the end of last year after a six year stint. “It was time to move on”, she says. “I’d been there for six years and I wanted to get back into acting and stand up and just simply wasn’t possible to do those things while I was doing a five-days-a-week thing with Rove. And I just needed a new challenge too. It was becoming a little bit too easy and I needed to scare myself again.”
Working closely alongside Rove McManus, Peter Helliar, Wil Anderson and Dave Hughes, Corinne’s has been a prominent female face punctuating a world dominated by male comedians. Although opportunities in the Australian comedy industry continually improve for female comedians, the terms are still far from equitable. There is still a lot of opposition and antagonism from the general public and segments of the industry directed towards female comedians. Corinne notes that that antagonism will continue to come from some quarters. “There will always be sexist men in the world” and “women with savagely low self esteem about their own sex” she says. ” That whole idea of women not being funny… almost any man who says that, you question him on it you’ll then turn around and you’ll find some woman that he will go, ‘oh yeah well apart from Kath & Kim and Ellen DeGeneres and Whoopi Goldberg and a million others.” In response to one of the producers of the film “The Aristocrats”, who came out in support of Jerry Lewis when Jerry Lewis said women aren’t funny, Corinne says “the only reason that your very, very average documentary [The Aristocrats] got any notoriety at all is because of what Sarah Silverman said, so you’re a massive cock”. She adds “for me, it’s not as bad as when Scotty and Gibbo and Rachel started out at all, but it’s always gonna be, as long as sexism exists, just as difficult as it is in any other male dominated industry …”chicks aren’t funny”, oh god that’s boring”
With her wide television exposure Corinne tended to attract a wide demographic to her show. “It did affect the show” she says. “You read reviews and well yeah, it was a pretty general show…look at my audience, they’re twenty two and they’re sixty five, I had to try and appeal to everyone in amongst all of that, same as what Adam Hills has to do, he gets the same thing from Spicks and Specks. And I’m also working to an audience at the top end who are relatively well informed on political issues and at the other end who are Rove viewers who are relatively well informed of “New Weekly” issues. So you have to have a show that’s not gonna be too political or too celebrity based ‘cause these two groups don’t cross over at all.” Asked if comedy is an art form Corinne says “Y ou do need a specific set of skills and you do need to know those skills extremely well to be able to do it properly, and it’s an art form to be able to get on stage and make it look like you have no skills at all. It’s like being a magician really, you don’t want to see the tricks of the trade at all, you don’t want anyone to know hew long you spent writing this joke, it should look like it’s just coming off the top of your head. That’s an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. It is tedious when comedy is seen as a lesser art form.”
She adds, responding to those people who disregard the skill base and suggesting that anyone could do it “you know give it a red hot go and just see what happens to you sunshine…the skill to it is to make it look like it’s not an art form, the fact that people denigrate it probably means that we’re doing our job too well.”
Corinne Grant is appearing in her inaugural Edinburgh Fringe Festival Show Nice Friendly Lady Hour from the 12th to the 28th of August