Shaun Micallef asks to meet beneath his favourite tree, a stoic, gnarly grandfather pine bent sideways from decades of unforgiving sea winds in a park at Williamstown, the bayside suburb of Melbourne where he lives.
A publicist has sent his photograph of the meeting place, so there may be no confusion. The aesthetically composed picture silhouettes the tree’s dark canopy –resembling a chook in flight – against pristine sky, the cephalopod arms of the trunk bisecting the blue-green horizon of Port Phillip bay. The tree and the picnic table it shelters are unmissably distinctive.
Australia’s most celebrated living sketch comedian and his partner discovered village-ish Williamstown when Micallef was acting in the much-loved TV series Sea Change, filmed there 25 years ago. Just 9km west of Melbourne at the apex of the bay, moody waters gird Williamstown on three flanks, rendering it nautically picturesque and idyllically distinct from the city.
“You don’t drive through it. You’ve got to come here to have an ice-cream or for some purpose. Like to talk to an ageing comedian,” says Micallef, gravel crunching underfoot as we stroll the path around Port Gellibrand this warm, still and clear early spring morning.
He does this most days for about an hour. Sometimes with the dog. It’s his only exercise. It works. At 62 Micallef appears lean and fit.
“Having never played sport, my knees are fine. And [walking is] easy. I think from maybe the waist down I’m pretty fit,” he says.
Micallef engages with easy, warm self-assurance. He is acutely thoughtful, reflective and focused both on “the moment” (stressing the importance of living in it several times) and the legacies of this “next” phase of his performing career.
When the final, 15th series of his anarchic, much celebrated Mad as Hell was announced in 2022, he talked about it being time “for someone younger to take advantage of the [ABC] resources”.
He wanted a break, after 11 years of Mad as Hell, to spend time with his ageing parents and with his three adult sons, to travel with wife Leandra “and reassess what I had left to do”.
It all gave the impression, perhaps, he was done with TV.
But he was far from it.
He determined there were “a couple of final chapters in terms of being an on-screen presence”.
Since then he has had a continued and unexpected ubiquity on ABC comedy talkshow Eve of Destruction and SBS’s Shaun Micallef’s Origin Odyssey where he pairs with young comedians to journey overseas and parse their backgrounds.
“I’m 63 next year. I can feel that the hunger I used to have has turned into a taste for it rather than a real need to do it any more … so I’ve chosen to do things that either I mucked up first time around … or that I’ve never done before.”
With both Eve of Destruction and Origin Odyssey he’s consciously telling others’ stories. Next year there’ll be a documentary on Australia’s predilection for gambling.
“I feel like I’m in the service of others rather than myself.”
We continue along the path as it hugs the bay. Joggers and young parents with prams and babies strapped to their chests are out in force. Dogs wander off-leash, racing after balls, snuffling in low bushes and circling one another.
Micallef’s world is busy and quite noisy, but mostly when he walks it is alone and it’s in silence.
“I try and be in the moment as much as I can. I don’t stop and take pictures. Because I feel like ‘what am I doing that for? I’m curating it.’ I may as well look at it now.”
To that end, he mentions the beautiful light playing off Port Phillip bay to our right and “the gift” of a dolphin pod he recently witnessed.
He stops mid-sentence and points.
“There we go. I like that. It’s pretty cool,’’ he says, referencing the Point Gellibrand timeball – a striking colonial structure whose great copper-plate sphere would drop down a mast at 1pm daily – a time signal to old-time sailors.
Going to school in Adelaide near the sea and living bayside today he appreciates water’s meditative influence.
“There’s something about being on the edge, right by the coast, that’s quite appealing. And yet I won’t swim. I don’t think I’ve gone in the water. Ever. I don’t like immersing myself in the water. I like looking at it.”
It’s a convenient segue to the backstory of the Adelaide schoolboy who grew up for a time without a TV and, so, listened obsessively to The Goon Show, wrote down its berserk jokes and repeated them to classmates before stumbling on to the comic essays of Marx Brothers writer SJ Perelman and going to the state library to devour them in back copies of the New Yorker. He then worked as a solicitor for 10 years before chancing it all by moving to Melbourne to write and perform comedy.
The influences of Perelmen and the Goons – as well as an array of other writers (from Dostoevsky to Bertrand Russell, of whom he’s a devotee) are reflected in Slivers, Shards and Skerricks, his recently released second anthology of short comic writing that skips from poetry to prose, and from politics to philosophy.
So much of Micallef’s work is acutely political. For nothing wounds the public official quite like an Exocet of intelligent parody straight into the political bunker.
But since the end of news-driven Mad as Hell, Micallef pays less attention to domestic politics. Mad as Hell, it’s worth remembering, became part of the national political lexicon through the eye-roll takedown of Bill Shorten’s awkwardly delivered one-line “zingers’’.
He met Shorten – “a good sport’’ – once or twice.
“John Doyle [Raging Roy Slaven of Roy and HG] … said he never really wanted to meet the people they were making fun of because suddenly they are human and you feel guilty about doing it,” he says.
“And that’s my experience. As soon as I stumble across somebody – even if they like the show – I feel like I can’t do them anymore. I met [unsparingly lampooned National Party senator] Bridget McKenzie not that long ago. And we used to make terrible jokes about her. But she was very nice about it. She said hello and I said, ‘Well that’s it – you’re off the list now’.”
As we stop and sit at the picnic table under his favourite crooked tree, we return to Shaun Micallef’s longtime concealment behind sketch characters and his more exposed “final chapters” present.
His mother is, like his father, in her 80s. Her recent propensity for funeral attendance reminds him of the “finite nature” of life and ambition.
“All that’s done is make me try to take advantage of any opportunities that come along … you know this is not a dress rehearsal for anything – this is the show. Do your best act. Get off with a bow and a dignified wave before someone else pushes you offstage. Or the hook comes out.”
Of the more exposed self, he says, “I think I’ve probably put away my tricks over time. Probably the version onscreen now that is not preoccupied with writing and delivering jokes and who’s now being there for somebody else, well – that’s probably more like me than ever.”
He smiles.
You sound really quite happy?
“Occasionally I make that observation to my partner. I actually feel it’s literally remarkable enough to remark on it! I say ‘I’m happy at the moment and that worries me’. But being in the moment is about not processing that or thinking about it of course.”
Slivers, Shards and Skerricks by Shaun Micallef is out now through Affirm Press
