WORDS Michael McVeigh

A simple microphone nearly ended Damian Callinan’s stand-up career before it had even begun.

Damian Callinan remembers feeling pretty confident going into his first stand-up gig. At the time he’d finished studying drama and was ready to move from teaching into a new career path. He’d seen others performing at an amateur comedy night at Melbourne’s Esplanade Hotel and wasn’t too impressed by what he’d seen.

‘I thought if that’s what beginners are like I could walk past that rabble. I was a bit cocky, to tell you the truth.’

He rang and booked in to perform at the same hotel two weeks later, then carefully prepared a script. But when he walked out on stage, it all fell apart.

‘I hadn’t really thought about the microphone’, he says. ‘I got on stage and thought I’ll take it out. But I was so nervous, my hands were shaking and I couldn’t get it out.’

Wrestling onstage with the microphone, he realised he hadn’t said anything to the audience yet.

‘I went to my script and said the first thing I wanted to say, then stopped to yank the microphone. Of course, it sounded like I was waiting for a laugh.’

He saw two people in the front row exchange a look ‘like the two old guys in The Muppets’, and it was downhill from there.

‘I remember looking out and the only thing I could hear was the soft drumming from the band in the front room’, Damian says. ‘I could actually hear glasses being cleaned at the bar.’

With such a harrowing baptism, Damian could have been forgiven for giving up comedy altogether. But with practice and persistence, the 44-year-old has managed to put together a long and successful career on stage, radio and television.

He was one of the stars of the TV sketch show Skithouse, and has been a regular on Before the Game and The Wedge as well as appearing on a number other shows. He has also co-hosted programs on Triple J and 774 ABC, as well as hosting segments on Mix FM, Fox FM and MMM FM.

But it has been on the comedy circuit where he has achieved the most success, winning a number of awards over his career. His shows tend to be theatrical in style, with Damian playing a range of different characters. In ‘Sportsman’s Night’, one of his most famous shows, he plays a young documentary maker going back to his hometown to film the demise of a football club. In other shows he’s brought a school speech night to life, and re-visited the Eureka Stockade.

‘Most of my shows are a story’, he says. ‘I create a narrative. Sometimes it’s all characters, sometimes it’s me and other characters.’

Raised in a Catholic family, and going to Catholic primary and secondary schools, Damian says he’s spent 30 years of his life in Catholic institutions. After graduating from Australian Catholic University with a teaching degree, he taught in a range of Catholic schools, most recently at Melbourne’s Penola College.

In 2001 he drew on some of those experiences to do a show called ‘Midnight Mass’ with Lawrence Mooney. In the show, a struggling parish uses Christmas mass to try and lure lapsed Catholics back into the fold.

‘Lawrence and I played two different priests. He was the misogynistic one who would tear into the once-a-year-ers, and I was this young reformist Irish curate, who was coming up with all the ideas of how to keep people coming.

‘I’ve been brought up in that world, it’s part of my identity’, he says. ‘My experience is that Catholics have a great sense of humour. On the whole, it was well received.’

Damian has finished teaching, but he still goes out to schools to perform at staff days, as well as running comedy classes for students. The classes are half performance/half workshop, where he performs skits then goes back and shows students how particular characters are constructed. He also helps support young comedians through the Class Clowns project as part of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

His latest show, Is This Thing On?—The Dave Berry Story, revisits that first stand-up experience and wonders what might have been if things had gone another way. Like Damian, the main character is a teacher who decides to give comedy a go at the age of 30. Unlike Damian, he’s still struggling to get a laugh.

‘He’s no good, but he just keeps trying and trying’, says Damian. ‘The twist is this: at the point when he’s about to shut up shop, a guy makes a documentary about him. The documentary becomes a cult hit and he suddenly becomes famous. He unwittingly creates a genre called “so bad it’s good”.

‘Of course, there’s no substance to it so eventually it all falls away. It’s about fame as much as the comedy world.’

www.damiancallinan.com.au