Dave Bushell and Xavier Michelides are both stand-up and sketch comedy veterans who have paired up for the Melbourne Comedy Festival to create the darkly comic Passion of Crime. Daniel Nicholls caught up with the shorter half of the pair, Dave Bushell.
Tell me about your show.
It’s a fake true-crime documentary, it’s a comedy murder-ballad. That’s how I’ve been flyering the show: “Hey, do you wanna see a comedy murder ballad? It’s like Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads, but in sketch comedy form.” and they’re always like: “Who’s Nick Cave?” It’s a dark show, while it is made up of individual sketches there is a bit of a story across the whole show as well.
How did you and Xavier come to work together?
I saw Xavier’s show (The Post-Apocalyptic Users’ Guide) last year and I thought it was just great so I just approached him at the bar and flattered him out of his mind and then spoke to him about doing a show together.
What was the original inspiration for the show?
I was listening to a song by The Drones and it really just evoked all these crazy images of the bush, searing heat, old Colonial imagery. So I was listening to this song with all that in my head and reading this article in The Age about Martin Bryant and why he did what he did, and I know that sounds like a pretty dark starting point for a comedy show, but there was something just so intrinsically Australian about what happened, the environment and the motive and Colonial Port Arthur, and so I wanted to do a story or stories set in the bush, to tap into that sort of Australian character.
If you look at all the famous murders in our country, not just historical ones but contemporary ones like Port Arthur, Ivan Milat, Peter Falconio, they’re all out in the bush. It all ties into that idea of that famous Australian character of a lone man facing the elements, they’re like the flip-side of that, and it’s never really been explored in comedy even though it’s such an iconic idea. And as horrendous as those crimes were, what they have in common with comedy is just how over-the-top they are, by virtue of their very nature. Think about Snowtown- bodies in barrels, you couldn’t write that without thinking: “That’s a bit much, it’s not believable.” And yet it happened! And because we never truly know what happened, it is just as much a mystery as it is a horror, and that fascinates us at the same time that it repulses us. How much of that Australian Gothic feeling we managed to retain I don’t know, but it was always the intellectual underpinnings of the show.
What was the writing process for the show?
It was pretty weird for both of us, we sort of impro’d a lot of a script, just coming up with scenarios of why people would kill each other, basically, and tried to keep it all in line with that sort of Australian Gothic ideal. We worked a lot with Adrian Calear (Code Grey) at the start of the process. The mantra was that we wanted to show the ridiculousness of the justification of crime. The line between the darkness and the humour is all about just how dumb someone has to be to put themselves in a situation where they’re committing this criminal act. It’s such a stupid thing to do that you can be horrified or you can just make fun of these idiots! In the show a lot of the authority figures look inept; people who want to be serial killers fail on their first try; or we show these human aspects to these terrible people, like just showing that they go through the same mundane shit we do, but we don’t happen to have baby skins hanging on hooks out the back yard.
You mentioned The Drones and Nick Cave, is music important to the show?
We’ve got a section of the show that’s called ‘Great Aussie Crimes of the 70’s and 80’s’ which is set against all this classic Australian rock. There’s so much murder in our history, you find it almost everywhere you look, even music. That musical element is a lot of fun and really helps to create this immersive environment from the first second you walk into the room.
How different is this iteration of the show to the one that played in last year’s Fringe festival?
We trialled it in Fringe, just did three nights near the end and it went really well. We had no idea if it was going to work on the opening night, neither of us had tried to make such dark material funny before, so it was good to know that audiences found it as funny as we did. However this time around it’s a slightly different show, we’ve added two new sketches that are both a lot of fun. One of the new ones has me and Xavier playing lovers who are breaking up as we bury a body. We also changed another of the sketches to make it a bit more creepy.
You are also featuring in a special Anarchist Guild Social Committee meeting.
Yep, we’re doing a show for Trade Aid on Saturday the 3rd, we’ll have a heap of amazing guests for that show: Oliver Clark, Neil Sinclair, Toby Truslove, heaps of people. It’s always fun to get everyone together, though it’s tricky because everyone has their own shows as well.
Care to do a plug for Xavier’s solo show on his behalf?
Xavier’s show is called Happy by Request, at the Forum. That’s a very different show for Xavier. All of his previous shows have been like crazy, post-apocalyptic, alien-sex-party-zombie-swinger-orgy-werewolf-wanking-museum, weird shows like that. But after we decided to do Passion of Crime he wanted to just do an over-the-top positive one, so it’s sort of the opposite of our show in terms of tone.
Passion of Crime runs until April 17th at Trades Hall. For full booking details go to the Melbourne Comedy Festival website
The Anarchist Guild Social Committee is on Saturday April 3rd at Trades Hall. For full booking details go to the Melbourne Comedy Festival website
Happy by Request runs until April 18th at the Forum Theatre. For full booking details go to the Melbourne Comedy Festival website