WIL ANDERSON

For The Willionth Time

Fresh from the international leg of his tour, Wil Anderson is bringing his new live stand-up show Man vs Wil to the Astor Theatre for four shows over two nights on Friday, October 21, and Saturday, October 22. Bookings can be made through BOCS.

For almost two decades, Wil Anderson has meandered around Australia and abroad, charming audiences with his trademark blend of dick jokes and political satire. Now on his 16th show, he has stuck to the formula of using a pun of his name as the title, but is concerned that this time around audiences may be expecting him to crawl inside an animal carcass or drink the liquid from elephant shit.

“There’s no Bear Grylls references at all in this show. I can tell people it’s 100 per cent Bear Grylls free,” Anderson explains. “I feel like I should just jam a Bear Grylls joke in there. But no, I like my shows to in no way reflect their title.”

With these expectations blown out of the water, you may be wondering what the show is actually about. “It’s about 70 minutes of the funniest things I can think of and say, in a row,” he explains. “There is an extra layer there but I don’t mind if people come to the show and just laugh their ass off for 70 minutes and go home and go ‘I learned nothing!’, that’s totally fine with me.”

Plenty of people have laughed their collective asses off to Man vs Wil already, including American audiences, who Anderson found to have a more mature comedy palette than his home crowds. “I think they are less uptight than we are. I mean I’m not sure of the culture, I’m not speaking of them as a culture, but as comedy audiences they have a much greater understanding of comedy than we do,” he says. “That’s not to say if you made the same jokes in the street... I mean, you might get a bit of pushback on that.”

By no means has Anderson grown sick of Australian audiences, but he does distinguish us from our Yankee counterparts. “Comparing the comedy scene in America to the comedy scene here is like comparing the Olympics to the Commonwealth Games. We’re all doing the same thing and there’s Olympic level athletes at the Commonwealth Games. It doesn’t make our scene worse. But by the very nature of numbers, there’s obviously a whole bunch of really, really brilliant people working there.”

On his home turf, Anderson came under fire last year for infamously Tweeting at the Logies, hanging shit on the likes of John Mayer and Brian McFadden. “What people are offended by or what people complain about, you can never second-guess that. So you’ve just got to be true to yourself, and people have the right to be offended.”

Despite the uproar at some of his previous Tweets, he maintains the social networking site is an effective way of connecting with his fans. “The thing about Twitter is that you can really curate who you’re talking to in a way,” he explains. “They have to sign up to you, so they already have to go ‘Hey, I’m interested in you’. So by that very nature the things that you’re saying are hopefully interesting to them.”

When faced with hateful Tweets, Anderson says he simply blocks the fuckwits. With over a 100,000 followers, this would seem like a difficult task. “It’s a self-sorting process. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going through [my followers] to identify fuckwits. The one thing you can always guarantee about a fuckwit is that they’ll eventually put up their hand and say ‘Hey, I’m a fuckwit!’,” he explains. “If you follow someone on Twitter, and you don’t like the way they Tweet, don’t follow them.”

_AIDAN SHAW