by Joel Creasey
Admittedly, I’ve always known I was funny. If someone asks me if I think I’m funny, I say yes. I never understand comedians who get asked that question and are unsure how to answer. Obviously you think you’re funny if you’re getting up on stage to tell jokes to an audience. Especially if you’re expecting to be paid!
I’ve also always known I could use humour both as a weapon and as a defence mechanism. I realised from a young age that I could make adults laugh – definitely more than other kids around me could. Other kids could make adults laugh, but they were doing it in a ‘kid’ way. I could genuinely make them laugh the way their funny adult friends did, whether it was a spirited aside or a comment about someone we were walking past. Plus I knew the added shock of it coming out of a child’s mouth would enhance the joke. I also understood delivery and timing, which are two of the most important ingredients in jokes and stand-up.
Essentially, I started my life in comedy as a prop comic (vomit). When my parents were having dinner parties, with Mum serving her signature creamed veal, I would put on a show as ‘Magical Mafisto’ – a magician who couldn’t quite get it right. I had a briefcase of magic tricks, although I didn’t know how to do any of them. But that didn’t matter – they were all just vehicles for me to deliver my improvised comedy. I remember my parents and their friends falling around the dinner table, laughing. My delivery was perhaps not quite so refined and perhaps at times they were actually laughing at me and not with me. And perhaps they had polished off the equivalent of a Dan Murphy’s stocktake sale (Mum’s creamed veal wasn’t for everyone). None of that mattered, though, because the attention was still working out for me . . . it was well and truly past my bed time and they hadn’t noticed.
In school productions I always wanted (ie demanded) to take the lead as the comedy character. As I would in drama class. Unlike most kids, who wanted to play the dramatic role and the over-the-top death scene, I was much happier providing the comic relief. If it involved being a fuddy-duddy old woman or wearing a wig, even better. Life is always better in a wig (that’s the title of my next book, actually).
In Grade 7 for our school assembly item the drama class performed Snow White. I took the script away after school and completely rewrote it – notably my part. I modernised the story and changed the magic mirror to a magic TV, making myself the TV news anchor. I also painted all the sets by hand, using all the tips I’d picked up on the Better Homes and Gardens fan forum.
The performance slayed (that’s a drag queen term for ‘the show went really well’). And by this point I was already addicted to the drug that is the sound of laughter elicited from a live audience.
A year before, I’d auditioned and successfully won a part at North Lakes Children’s Theatre. This was a co-curricular program for children in Grades 6 and 7. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons we were allowed to leave school at lunch time and attend this special theatre group of thirteen students who had auditioned and been selected out of hundreds from the surrounding schools. Here we learned drama and advanced English – including language, pronunciation and diction – and would perform a two-week season of a show at the end of the year for school groups, family and friends. Attending North Lake Children’s Theatre was the highlight of my week. Otherwise I’d sit in school staring out the window, bored out of my mind and wondering whether I should try a perm or not.
A man called Clyde Selby took the classes. He was a gentle but sharp older man who really helped shape my early performance life and taught me so much about stagecraft that I still use every time I step on stage. He was smart, funny and dry. A Dumbledore-esque figure, if you will.
My friend Ashleigh Prosser (a different Ashleigh to the one I’ve mentioned earlier), who also attended my primary school, had won a spot in the theatre group too and she and I adored going each Tuesday and Thursday and being allowed to accelerate our performance. We were involved in our school’s drama program but it wasn’t enough for us, we wanted to perform morning, noon and night – with other kids who took it as seriously as us.
I loved the end-of-year productions at the North Lake Children’s Theatre. Each year the play was written by Mr Selby, and would always deal with topics like bullying, self-esteem and self-discovery. We would do hair and make-up and have a live audience every day and night. At first I thought it was purely an educational experience for the audience. But looking back, I realise it was as much a learning experience for us. It’s only now I see that Mr Selby didn’t just select necessarily the best actors for the program, he chose people who were perhaps a little different, and didn’t always fit in with the Australian norm of a sports-focused, rough-and-tumble primary school. He chose kids who needed an escape and an outlet for their talents, to be with like-minded people.
Through the children’s theatre I got a huge taste of the performance lifestyle – I was hooked and knew I had to be a performer. I just hadn’t quite put my finger on what kind of performer. I thought I was going to be a very serious actor or a fuddy-duddy old woman in a wig. Unfortunately back then there weren’t many roles going for a young, limp-wristed actor living in Perth. And Margaret Court has the fuddy-duddy old woman market cornered.
Clyde Selby also taught me a lot about modesty, like how to check your ego and never allow yourself to get consumed by your own self-importance, which is an important early lesson for performers – and humans in general, for that matter. It can be hard not to be consumed by yourself at times. After all, your product is yourself. My business is literally being Joel Creasey. I earn my money by playing Joel Creasey.
And finally, Mr Selby truly taught us the importance of books and reading. He would often pull particular students aside and recommend a book he knew would be perfect just for them. It’s only writing this now that I realise how proud I am to write a book that could potentially take up a prestigious position on his bookshelf. (Note to self: offer Mr Selby 10% discount on book.)
I attended high school at Wesley College in South Perth, a prominent private boys’ school that features alumni like Ben Cousins and Buddy Franklin. It always makes me laugh – on their Wikipedia page, under ‘Notable alumni’, it reads: Ben Cousins, Buddy Franklin . . . Joel Creasey. Hmm, pick the odd one out. (Not sure what you were thinking, but obviously it’s Ben – Buddy and I still have careers.)
At high school I was part of the drama program but Wesley was so focused on sport that drama really took a back seat – I had to hustle to get anything out of the drama department at all. The class was held in a dilapidated old building at the back of the school and we went through about six teachers in my time as a student. Perhaps it was the lack of funding or perhaps it was the pressure placed on them by me. No other subject truly interested me the way drama did, so obviously I wanted my drama teachers to take it seriously.
In fact my first drama teacher was a Chris Lilley/Mr G-type character who was so distraught by the way the school treated him that he wrote a rebellious note for us to take home to our parents, outlining how utterly shit the school was and urging them to pull us out and send us to another school. The day after he sent that letter home he was absent from class – in fact, I never saw him again. I like to imagine him being dragged, kicking and screaming, from the drama department yelling things like, ‘I NEVER GOT TO TEACH THEM THE STANISLAVSKI METHOD!’
(Nerdy side note for all my drama peeps reading this: Stanislavski can get fucked. His ‘methods’ were ridiculous. Captain fucking Obvious.)
Midway through high school I decided that most of the teachers truly did not give a shit. Don’t get me wrong, I had the odd gem of a teacher. Like Mrs Rafferty, my Grade 9 English teacher, who was utterly fabulous. She swore at us, cracked jokes, would heckle students if their English presentation wasn’t interesting . . . She actually cared. At the end of the year, she took a few weeks off to have a breast reduction. Naturally, we threw her a Happy Breast Reduction Party the day before she left. She loved it.
Or Ms De San Miguel. She was my Political and
Legal Studies teacher and always my favourite. I initially fell in love with her because she looked like a cross between Rikki-Lee Coulter from Australian Idol and Schapelle Corby. She was younger than most of our teachers and more on our wavelength and genuinely engaged her class, coming in each day with something new and interesting, even when it came to mind-numbing topics like the Australian Constitution. Tough read, let me tell you.
Looking back now, I can see she recognised I was gay the minute we met. And she became somewhat of a fabulous friend for me throughout high school – I’d go flouncing into her office whenever I had a problem: ‘I just cannot seem to get the lighting right for our production of Julius Caesar!’ We’d sit in her office and, over a couple of flat whites, chat, constantly getting off topic and gossiping about whatever was in the news.
Ms De San Miguel re-married and is now Mrs McGivern, but I call her Lynette. She has remained a close friend since I left high school and is a huge supporter, even staying with me when she visits Melbourne. I still bitch to her about lighting I’m unhappy with, too.
In a way, I thank my high school for being an uncomfortable fit for me because I learned an incredibly valuable lesson – create your own shit. If there’s nothing for you to do, make something yourself. Make yourself an opportunity and then fill it. And that’s exactly what I did. From about Grade 10 on, I decided that if most of these teachers didn’t give a shit about me then I didn’t give a shit about them. So I busied myself either putting on shows, competing on the school mock trial team or working as the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper.
Previously, the student paper had been a double-sided piece of paper quickly thrown together with a few of the sports results and a brief mention of academic results. It came out sporadically, twice a year if we were lucky – whenever whoever was in charge could give a fuck. When Grade 12 rolled around for me, I didn’t ask any questions, I just took over. Under my reign (if you will), we upped the student paper to a glossy fifty-page colour magazine and rebranded it the Wesley Inquirer, complete with an agony aunt section and gossip column. If I could have squeezed in a few full page ads for Louis Vuitton or Rolex, I bloody would have! By the end of Grade 12, I was publishing a September issue à la Vogue with a completely black cover and ‘WI’ for Wesley Inquirer in gold. Sadly, none of my sub-editors backed me in changing the magazine’s title to Just Joel but you can’t win them all. It’s not a coincidence that The Devil Wears Prada movie adaptation came out a year prior – I clearly took the wrong message from it. After the September issue was released, a note was passed around the staff saying, ‘Once Joel Creasey graduates in a few months, let’s cut down the size of the student paper . . . And definitely no more completely black covers, the school has run out of black print cartridges.’
Another area I immersed myself in was the Young Achievers program, a shit name for what is actually a pretty cool concept. Young Achievers is a national school-based small business program; the apprentice The Apprentice. You sign up to be part of the group at your school, start a small business, make a product, sell shares, sell the product, and at the end of the year split the profit among the shareholders.
I was of course the General Manager of Wesley’s Young Achievers company. Now, I can’t remember if I had to win that position or if, like the Wesley Inquirer, it was simply a matter of me telling everyone I was the boss, but I suspect it was the latter. Our company was called PsychYAdelic as you had to have ‘YA’ in your company title. The company name suggestion of ‘Fuck YA’ saw me fire my first employee. Our company sold novelty TV shirts and a few other boys and I took control, designing, sourcing printers and marketing our product. It was very Project Runway Junior. Across the year we presented our products at Young Achievers trade fairs, competing against other schools’ companies. Naturally, I loved the competition. I roped in Mum and Dad to drive me in early and help me set up our stall and I would stay there all day, watching over the other boys in our group like a hawk – making sure there wasn’t a second where they weren’t making a potential sale. I was like Undercover Boss without the undercover part.
As a result, PsychYAdelic was the most profitable national company, both at the high school and also at university level.
Then I went on to compete in the Young Business Person of the Year competition, also run by Young Achievers, successfully becoming Western Australia’s Young Business Person of the Year after presenting to a judging panel of prominent WA business people. I delivered a funny but informative presentation of our company (I knew I had comedy up my sleeve), and was flown to Sydney to compete nationally against each state’s representative. Ultimately I lost to some chick from Canberra whose company sold buttons. Frankly, I’ve never lived it down. Selling fucking buttons. From fucking Canberra. Get. Fucked!
Of course I was Wesley’s drama captain from about Grade 10. Technically you could only be the drama captain in Grade 12 but I somehow twisted the rules and (channelling my inner Meryl) became somewhat of an Iron Lady figure, having a reign that spanned longer than it should have. In 2007 the pinnacle of my time as drama captain was, the Grade 12 production. Although I’d been involved in other school productions, this year I didn’t have any pesky seniors to rain on my parade. And you’d better believe that song was my anthem.
As much as I controlled the drama department, our drama teacher (number six by the time I was in Grade 12) got to choose the school musical. She chose Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and I was fuming. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Seriously? I was thinking more along the lines of Madam Butterfly or War of the Roses. How the fuck were we supposed to stage Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? And how would we do that creepy scene with all the grandparents in the same bed like some weird senior orgy? Not to mention Slugworth, who is without doubt a paedophile. Yeah, sure . . . you’re after the recipe for the Everlasting Gobstobber. If I had a dollar . . .
Naturally I wanted the lead role of either Charlie or Willy Wonka. Our drama teacher took this moment to exact some revenge on me and cast me as Mike Teevee’s father. The day the cast was revealed I was furious. I quietly excused myself from drama class, went to the bathroom and screamed at the top of my lungs into my school blazer. Think Diane Keaton in First Wives Club when she bashes the shit out of Marcia Gay-Harden – that level of crazy. And as I said, the drama building was pretty run down, so the rest of the class definitely heard me.
For the first few weeks I turned my back on the production but when I saw there was no control and no direction, I couldn’t help myself. ‘Maybe you could go get us some coffees?’ I said to the teacher as I turned to the rest of the class. ‘Right, I’m back. Where do we begin?’
Luckily, given that I was also the editor-in-chief of the student paper, I gave the production tons of free advertising space. I also organised for PsychYAdelic to sell the merchandise in the foyer. I had a monopoly on that fucking school.
At this point I still had my heart set on acting, but as I discovered who I was, I also quickly realised that there aren’t many roles for camp, limp-wristed sixteen-year-olds living in Perth. I’d watched stand-up for several years but I didn’t understand until Grade 12 that I, too, could do that. And it wasn’t until I sat up late one night on my laptop watching Joan Rivers YouTube clips that I recognised that that was me. Admittedly, I was never the class clown and I think boys in my year would have been surprised when I got into comedy. It wasn’t so much that I wasn’t funny at school, it was just that I had already decided that I had more to do in life than kick a footy on the oval each lunchtime, so I didn’t really bother wasting jokes on my classmates. Most breaks I’d hang around with the staff, making them laugh. I’d love to target a particularly grouchy staff member. If I complained about a grumpy teacher, Mum would say to me, ‘If anyone can crack them, you can!’ And I always loved that challenge.
At the end of Grade 12, Ms De San Miguel, being the brilliant teacher she was, gave all the students in her Political and Legal Studies class a Mr Men
book that matched our personality. I got Mr Funny. That was the confirmation I needed. If she thought it, then I definitely was. That day I went straight home from school and signed up to the RAW Comedy Competition.
The RAW Comedy Competition is a national stand-up contest run by the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. They hold heats in each major city, then semi-finals and a state final. The state finalists then head to Melbourne for the national final, where the winner gets crowned and sent to Edinburgh. It’s like Australian Idol, if you will, minus Marcia Hines handing out irrelevant feedback. Remember that episode of Idol when Marcia said to a contestant ‘Well done. You came out here . . . you sang. Well done’? Yeah, no shit, Marcia.
I signed up to RAW Comedy not knowing how to construct a stand-up set or really what I was doing at all. A few weeks later, I told my parents about the competition, as I was going to be needing them. Literally: the Perth heats were being held at the Charles Hotel in North Perth and as I was underage, I would need my parents to sign me in. How very fucking rock and roll!
In true Terry and Jenny Creasey style they invited about twenty mates along and ‘made a night of it’. They were probably still pissed from a dinner party, to be fair. But still – no pressure. So less than three months after graduating high school, in early January of 2007 at seventeen years of age, I was backstage waiting to go on to perform stand-up comedy for the very first time. Little did I know it was to be my first of, oh, so very many . . .
When I first performed stand-up my set was actually a character (as cringey as that is to admit). I did a routine playing ‘Glenn Suave’, a Qantas flight attendant who was hellbent on taking over the world. Interestingly, I had performed this same character for my final Grade 12 drama examinations, which gave me one of the top scores in the state. Suck it, Willy Wonka. But this time, I repurposed Glenn and turned him into stand-up.
