Chris Taylor Interview (In Conversational with Lionel Corn)
Welcome to Impulse Gamer Chris and just letting you know that it was brilliant to see both you and Andrew live at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival this year. I must admit that not only did you have us in tears but it was one of the highlights of the festival!
Thank you and it was really great to do. It’s hard with the other Chasers guys who make The Checkout because Andrew and I always have half of the year to ourselves so we wanted to learn some new skills as we haven’t done much live work before. It’s a skill that both of us are keen to develop and do more of and it’s nice to get feedback like yours.
So now that you’re not Melbourne International Comedy Festival virgins anymore, are you guys coming back next year?
I certainly hope so and I would love to do it again but gee… it’s a competitive festival and there’s like 550 shows on, so you’re really competing with a lot of people to try and woo the audience to come and see you. It’s also a fun place to be that time of the year and even though Melbourne has a good energy at the best of times, it’s amplified even more during the Festival that creates this really warm atmosphere in the CBD. So I really hope that we get to do it again.
You’re taking your show, In Conversation with Lionel Corn to Giant Dwarf in Sydney, what are you most looking forward too?
With the Giant Dwarf shows, it’s like a home game for us if I can use a football analogy because it’s a theatre that we The Chasers guys have started up. We’ve taken a lease out on the theatre and run it as an opportunity for new and emerging writers, comedians, performers and storytellers to have a common venue where they can come and try stuff out. But the weird thing is that we have never done a show at Giant Dwarf so it felt like real oversight not performing there.
So Andrew and I will again be losing The Chasers virginity by finally doing a show at our own venue which will be really nice for us. It’s also a chance for us to bring the show to a new city, new audience and maybe try and hone it a bit because there was a couple of sections that we identified as maybe needing a bit of a tweak or rewrite so we’re always trying to make it as funny as possible. So the more times we get to do the show, the more times we get to improve it.
Can you tell us how you came up with the idea of Lionel Corn and whose idea was it to amalgamate with all these pop culture celebrities like George R. R. Martin?
I think that I came up with the idea and I wanted to do a spoof about these “In Conversation” events which I’ve been subjected to as a willing audience member. So a lot of big name TV writers have come out like Vince Gilligan from Breaking Bad, George R. R. Martin from Game of Thrones and Matthew Weiner (Mad Men) just came out and was in Sydney the other day for Vivid. I sort of noticed that it has become a bit of trend and almost a new type of entertainment for a TV writer to sit on stage and be interviewed.
It’s like doing live DVD commentary on stage which is then thrown open for audience questions and that was the part that amused me as we always thought the audience questions were pretty malign… it was almost like an inquisition as there is this great brain on stage who is insulted with inane questions from audience members. So I always thought that there was something very ripe for parody in that format.
So having come up with the idea of a kind of meet the author writer’s festival piss-take, it was Andrew as a big Game of Thrones fan wanted to make Lionel a kind of George R. R. Martin figure. However we never wanted it to be all about George R. R. Martin or Game of Thrones and I guess there’s only one section of the show that is explicitly about that when he talks about all the characters he’s killed in the show.
I think Andrew’s concern was that if it’s just a novelist, it’s not very relatable so we kind of needed a celebrity writer who works in TV as well as books and George R. R. Martin seemed to be the perfect epitome of that. We always imagined that the character of Lionel Corn would be an amalgam or generic functionary to stand in for all writers who submit themselves to these events rather than just one person like George R. R. Martin.
What about your character who is a budding radio personality and wannabe writer. How did you come up with this character?
I noticed at some of these events, the person in charge of moderating them tends to be a daggy person who usually works for the ABC. He’s not based on anyone but the people who tend to do this generally work in public broadcast and often spend a lot of the interview injecting their own work into the interview. Rather than just be an objective passive interviewer, they always felt the need to justify their own presence on stage by bringing up their own work and comparing it to who they are interviewing.
I guess the best example of this that I saw is Andrew Upton who is a playwright married to Cate Blanchet and he was interviewing Tom Stoppard, an acclaimed playwright. It was slightly cringe worthy watching Andrew Upton make attempts at comparing his own playwriting to the great Tom Stoppard. He spent like half the interview talking about his own work rather than Stoppard’s and I remember that very clearly and that was a nice note to take into the writing of the Lionel Corn show as they often talk about themselves.
When you guys get the giggles or the laughs on stage, how do you bring yourself back to the character that you are playing? Do you have any tactics?
The first trick is not to look into the eyes of the other performer because the minute Andrew and I get eye contact that might set us off. There are a couple of moments in the show where we’re in real danger of losing it and it’s not the jokes the audience seem to get… it may be a phrase or something Andrew will do or his moustache that might set me off. The only way back to professional discipline is to not look at him and try to find a surly looking person in the front row. There’s normally always one person who sits in the front row that has this look of great disapproval through the entire show so I’ll train my eyes on them and just remember that there is a person who looks incredibly glum and that brings me back to a state of sobriety.
Without spoiling the show too much for our Sydney readers, there is a scene in your show that I like to call, two comedians and a glass … will this be included in your show at Giant Dwarf?
It will and it’s a piece that Andrew wrote actually. I guess that we were a little concerned that our routine is not a physical show as it’s two middle-aged blokes sitting in a couple of chairs and from a parody point of view, it has to be that as that’s the nature of these events. We were concerned that it could get a little boring and we tried to devise a couple of moments of physicality that’s almost a vaudeville routine and he cooked up this very high gross out scene.
I always dread having to perform it one sense and what a lot of readers might not know is that I was quite ill during the Melbourne shows and I came off this bad bout of flu and laryngitis. So I was very conscience of having to spit into the glass of water every night for Andrew to drink because I didn’t want to pass on my germs but Andrew’s commitment to comedy led him to insist that I do spit into the glass and give it to him. I don’t particularly like gross out humour but I guess it just adds a different texture to show if there’s a risk that it’s getting too wordy and having a bit of a respite there helps with some gross out vaudeville.
We interviewed Andrew back in April who seems to be master of comedy trash-talk and we asked him that like The Goodies, would you both still be performing in your 70’s. He said he would but noted that your diet is horrendous and that they may need to wheel the fat corpse of Chris Taylor on stage. What’s your rebuttal to Andrew about that?
<laugh> Andrew’s diet is absurd in the other direction in that he won’t eat anything other than kale and quinoa. So my instruction is to drag my rotting enormous corpse to stage and to mix it cunningly into a soup of kale and force feed him on a drip, never telling him that it contains the flabby flesh of my corpse. So he’s actually getting a meat milkshake but he only thinks it’s a kale milkshake so the last laugh is on him.
So for people in Sydney, how would you sum up In Conversation with Lionel Corn?
It’s a great chance to see two of the people who started the Giant Dwarf Theatre performing a show in their own venue which is a timely piss take of these “In Conversation” events.
Finally Chris, what else do you have planned in 2015?
I’ve got a development deal with the ABC to write a pilot for a sitcom which I’ll be doing in August and September. We also just released a new show called Plonk that launches on Stan tomorrow which is a six episode narrative comedy about the wine industry. You can get all six episodes on Stan and it’s actually the second season as the original was done for YouTube. Season 2 will be on channel 9 later this year for free. Then we have The Chaser’s Media Circus which is back on air in October.
Thanks for your time Chris and all the best for In Conversation with Lionel Corn at Giant Dwarf in Sydney!
You’re welcome and thanks for your support!
Photos Credits: Evan Munro-Smith
Check out our five star review of In Conversation with Lionel Corn at
https://www.impulsegamer.com/in-conversation-with-lionel-corn-melbourne-international-comedy-festival-2015/
Live in Sydney and want to win tickets to In Conversation with Lion Corn? Check out our giveaway below –
https://www.impulsegamer.com/win-tickets-to-chris-taylor-andrew-hansen-and-tessa-waters/
About the Author
Andrew Bistak When he's not trying to save the world, Andrew enjoys travel (although loathes turbulence), going to the movies, reading and being a dad to his two dogs (and now twins) with his wife.
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