Shaun Micallef enrolled himself very young to comedy's school of the air, becoming an obsessive consumer of humour on radio and television.
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His father would find him lying under the radiogram, listening again and again to the words that got the laughs.
"I liked that world where you could hear laughs and people were being funny. You didn't need it to be explained to you: you just knew that it was funny," Micallef says.
"Everyone's different, but for me at that age, probably The Goon Show was the radio delivery system for a lot of what I found funny."
Micallef would tape the iconic BBC comedy program, which ceased production two years before he was born, to write out the scripts. He concedes it was incredibly nerdy.
"I guess I learned how to write by just absorbing the rhythms of the comedians that I liked. While that was going on, there was always the TV ... then I could see a lot of physical comedy as well, which I really liked," he says.
"It was just kind of a currency for me to knock around with my friends, impersonating those comedians that I liked. I had that ability to absorb and regurgitate that sort of material and get the laughs from doing impressions of basically The Goon Show or whoever had been on television that morning."
And he has never really escaped those influences.
"If I watch myself, I can see the inspiration that I had as a nine-year-old and I can hear the same voice of a particular comedy or whatever. I'll be careful about that now, but in the early days my influences were very readily on display. Hopefully at some point you get old enough and rise above it," he says.
This comedian's origin story makes Micallef's path to the bright lights of Melbourne and the fame of The Micallef P(r)ogram(me) and Mad As Hell seem preordained.
But his memoir, Tripping Over Myself, reveals what Micallef thought was a problem for a comedian: a happy childhood.
"As to whether the book is a helpful primer for any up-and-coming comedian wannabe, I don't know. It might be helpful," Micallef says.
"I used to love reading biographies about comedians and I still do, I still have them all. Everybody's stories a bit different.
"My story doesn't seem to have any dark periods in it, which is interesting. I say in the book: I worry about that slightly, because there's nothing.
"I didn't have any mad parents, I didn't have to survive a bomb explosion, I didn't live on the streets like Charlie Chaplin had to do. A mad mother and dissolute father - I don't have any of that."
Micallef, born in Adelaide in 1962 to a Maltese father and South Australian mother, grew up and got a proper job as a lawyer, having dabbled in the art of the university revue.
"People don't come along and knock on your door and say, 'Would you like to have a job in Melbourne?' You've actually got to get off your arse and go over there," he says.
"The poverty of my imagination was such that all I could possibly imagine was moving to Melbourne, and it took me until I was 30 to actually realise that's what I had to do. And then amazingly, it all fell into place."
Micallef packed his red Ford Capri, and with a word processor on the back seat and an ironing board protruding out the window, he set out east to the city that put comedians on telly.
Gary McCaffrie, who has worked with Micallef since their days in university revues, got Micallef a job writing on Full Frontal, a sketch comedy show broadcast on Channel 7. "I was very surprised that in retrospect it all looks pretty easy. I guess it was," Micallef says.
In those early years of his comedy career, Micallef says he had a hunger for doing it all. He had a feeling that he would die if he did not get opportunities to be funny.
"It started off as a real appetite and it became a real hunger and then became an appetite and becomes a taste. That's kind of where I'm at now," he says.
Perhaps that explains why he called time on Mad As Hell, the ABC show with a decade-long run that combined sketch comedy with political and news satire. "I think it was the right time. I think it's important to get off the stage just before the audience turns. And I think we were OK. I think they were still with us, the audience," Micallef says.
Mad As Hell was known for its self-referential humour, jokes wrapped in layers, wrapped in references, wrapped in enigmas linked back to material from episodes broadcast years prior.
"I was actually just writing things and sitting back and watching the audience and thinking, 'They're not going to get this. This is going to die in the arse and we won't be able to put this one to air'," Micallef says.
"But they liked it, they laughed at it and I thought, 'That's fine. We've completely won that one, that's interesting.'
"So the last couple of years ... [were] a little bit experimental, trying things out, seeing what works or not. I was very pleasantly surprised that we were able to get away with what we did."
The trick was offering something for everyone: whether political humour, clever characters or physical comedy.
"As long as they don't cancel each other out or step on each other, you treat each of them like a different instrument in a piece of music," Micallef says, ever attuned to the technique of getting the laugh.
"If you're lucky, you can get stuff harmonising a bit. You can get the gags weaving in and out of each other. It becomes a more interesting experience than hearing a bunch of jokes."
Speaking after the last program, Micallef says he is coming to terms with the fact he is going to have to think of something else to do. Helping younger comedians get a break is on his to-do list, as is documentaries, if people want him to make them.
The next Adelaide lawyer to pack it in and head east with Micallef's book as a guide will find a very different world. Micallef gives broadcast television another five years - but there's still a hunger for laughs.
Micallef will also step away from the pressure he put himself under on Mad As Hell.
"For me - and I don't want to complain - it was starting to occupy the full seven days a week. I was like one of those fish in a small aquarium and I'll just grow to the size of the aquarium," he says. "I'll just be as big as I need to be to fit into that aquarium."
Now the comedian who frequently uses his own name but never plays himself has written a memoir in his own voice.
"That's not what I do. I'm not a stand-up. I don't have that faculty. I'm always a bit of a construct, which is fine," Micallef says.
"I'm a sketch comedian. I deal entirely with material that I make out of my head. I regard my life as so dull that there's no way that I could trot that out in front of an audience and expect them to be amused by it."
But the process of writing the book revealed some of the truths of Micallef's life, so he says, whether or not he revealed his truest self.
"This is kind of it. I've only got one life," Micallef says.
"That's it, I've barely made 400 pages. I'm quite pleased with myself."
- Tripping Over Myself by Shaun Micallef. Hardie Grant. 320pp. $34.99.
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