Peter Helliar: The Craft of Comedy

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

Josh Szeps

Comedy Interviews, Education, Society & Culture, Comedy, Self-improvement

4.5 • 905 Ratings

🗓️ 11 June 2024

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Peter Helliar is one of Australia's biggest stand-up comedians. He was on TV every night for eight years as a panellist on The Project. He had his own network sitcom, How to Stay Married. He's a rockstar of the Melbourne Comedy Festival. He was nominated for Australia's biggest TV award, a Gold Logie. Last year, he was a contestant on I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! When we sat down with him recently, he was playing the narrator in a live production of The Rocky Horror Show.

This interview was recorded shortly after another comedian, Arj Barker, asked a breastfeeding mother to leave his Melbourne Comedy Festival show when the baby was making too much noise, sparking a cultural debate about discrimination against mums versus the craft of comedy. Peter is hugely insightful as a performer. Enjoy.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Goody, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. Peter Hellier is one of the most iconic and hilarious Australian stand-ups beloved of stage and screen, mostly small screen, but also sometimes big screen. He's been a fixture in our living rooms in Australia for a quarter of a century since he first appeared as a sidekick
0:22.1	to Rove McManus in Australia's version of the Tonight Show at the time in the late 90s,
0:27.8	ran for a decade called Rove, and Peter was there making us crack up all over the country.
0:34.9	More recently, in 2014, he joined the desk of a show called The Project,
0:40.3	which is an institution of Australian broadcasting. He was there for, what was that, about
0:45.6	eight years and left the year before last. And then last year, he was on, I'm a celebrity,
0:51.6	get me out of here. He now appears as the narrator in the
0:54.5	Rocky Horror Picture Show, a live, well, is it Rocky Picture Show if it's live or is it just
0:58.5	the Rocky Horror Show? You know the show I'm talking about. So he's on stage at the moment,
1:02.6	and I was so grateful to see him again. We have a little bit of history in the sense that
1:07.8	shortly after I had got my break in New York City as a host and producer
1:13.6	on HuffPost Live, which was this new streaming television network with tons of money behind it,
1:19.6	and it was the hot thing and the place where all the celebrities would go.
1:22.2	And I would host three, four or five half-hour shows every single day.
1:26.6	It was 12 hours a day. It was all great.
1:28.9	But after I'd been doing that for about 18 months or so, I was invited back to Australia
1:33.9	because the host of the project, Charlie Pickering, was leaving the show and they were
1:39.7	auditioning new hosts. So they brought me back. I sat in the chair for a couple of weeks, ended up going
1:46.0	back to New York. But in that time, working with Peter Hellier on a live television show at a panel
1:52.5	desk, it's live, it's based on the news, it's fast, it's furious. He was so quick-witted. He was so
1:59.3	hilarious and he was so generous that it's a delight to see
2:03.1	again my friend the very talented one-only peter hellier well i've always started at this now so
	...

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