Are you making enough money as a comedian to rip up your law degree?

Maybe not rip it up, but at least to fold it carefully and put it somewhere safe for a litte while.

 What is the most amusing part of the body?

A dead heat between the bum and the brain. The next great leap forward in comedy will be to combine the two to create a fart joke that makes you think.

 Were you asked to carry the Olympic torch? Would you have done it?

I wasn’t asked. I am enormously indifferent to the Olympics. I’ve been constantly indifferent to them from the moment the Sydney bid was first announced. Others have wavered and fallen into moments of enthusiasm, but I have been a rock of indifference.

 They say charity begins at home- what’s your home like, charity-wise?

Fantastic. I give of my time selflessly. Yesterday I spent three yours teaching the couch to read. Then I went out and played catch with the toaster.

 By Jacqui Taffel, The Sun Herald.

 With the announcement of nominations for this year’s TV WEEK Logie awards 2000, there might be some changes made about the home shared by nominees TV comedy host James O’Loghlin and actress Lucy Bell.

James has been nominated as Best New Talent for his comedy series O’Loghlin on Satuday Night, while his partner Lucy has been nominated for the Silver Logie as Most Popular Actress for her role in Murder Call.

And befitting the status of being a dual-nominee household, James says he has some redcorating ideas in mind for their Sydney home.

"First up, I think we’re going to have to install a chandelier in our place and a big banner in the hallway to let everyone know who they’re dealing with,"he quips.

If both James and Lucy should actually win a Logie on the night, he says that will present another decorating dilemma.

"With two Logies in the home, we would have to invest in a very broad mantlepiece and balance them at either end"

While James is a first time Logie nominee, this year is not his first in the "Logies arena", as he calls it. James was one of Andrew Denton’s team of writers working behind the scenes on last years’s awards.

But now he finds himself in the running for the prized statue, James confesses he has a plan up his sleeve to ensure he doesn’t go home empty handed.

"If I win, I’ll be the first bald person to ever win Best New Talent, and awarding this to a 34-year-old is a real landmark. I’ll campaign that it’s unfair that this Logie has always gone to someone under the age of 33. ‘New’ doesn’t have to mean young! But I’m thrilled to have been nominated- it means people have liked what you do."

This year, James will be kept busy with two TV projects. While nothing is final, he’s confident he’ll be returning to the ABC later in the year for another season of O’Loghlin On Saturday Night, while the cable channel Arena have signed him up to host Inside the Arena, a show which takes a critical look at the television industry.

"At last I can spend hours watching TV and not feel guilty" he says cheekily.

TV Week

The laughing lawyer

JAMES O'LOGHLIN IS A RARE example of a lawyer who finds his work inherently funny. This is probably because part of "his work" involves standing up in front of an audience and making them laugh at the things lawyers do.

Mr O'Loghlin started in comedy performing in yearly Law Revues while studying Economics/ Law at Sydney University. After completing his degrees, he followed the tried and tested path to the College of Law in 1990. It was at that point he realised he missed the fun of performing in annual law revues.

One night a friend dragged him along to see standup comedy at the Harold Park Hotel and two weeks later the young law graduate found himself doing his first live standup show as part of the Hotel's amateur performance slot. Since then he has maintained a dual career in law and comedy.

For O'Loghlin the secret of comedy is to talk about things that reach the audiences' shared experience. He thinks it healthy for every profession to have a laugh at itself and believes there is a lighter side to the things lawyers face each day.

"There is a temptation for the profession to take itself too seriously, after all lawyers are constantly faced with people who come to them with their problems - they are often in stressful situations and laughter is the best way to diffuse stress," says O'Loghlin.

When asked whether it's true most comedians are at heart depressed people, he explains that changes in mood are quite common for comedians as they go from the high of being on stage for, say, four hours a week when they feel like "the king of the world" to the low of spending the rest of the week at home trying to come up with new material.

This is not to say that O'Loghlin suffers from any form of depression - he is a calm, relaxed and cool comedian and he is also happy to know that he has the law to fall back on between shows.

The last twelve months have been good to O'Loghlin with several appearances on ABC's Good News Week, Hey Hey it's Saturday and writing gags for Andrew Denton's Breakfast Show on Triple M as well as wrapping up news events on live radio with Richard Glover on 2BL's "Thank God its Friday" forum.

He finished a successful three-week stint at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in April and has performed most recently in Sydney at the Harold Park Comedy Hotel in June with Lawyer Lawyer - a standup show which traces his life as a law student, his foray into the corporate world and his most recent work as a criminal lawyer.

When pressed to find a theme for Lawyer Lawyer he says it's about the value of choice. The show looks at the way he went from university to College and then into the corporate world without really making any conscious decisions about what he wanted to do. Before he knew it he was stuck in the corporate world and was forced to think about what he was doing and change his direction. He ended up working for the Legal Aid Commission as a criminal lawyer in Blacktown.

"That was a real eye-opener - my clients came from broken homes and I could see how strong the connection between crime and people's environment was," Mr O'Loghlin said.

He is currently practising criminal law at Legal Aid two days a week, where he has been for the past three and a half years, and says he enjoys it because it involves both legal and people skills and also gives him an opportunity to do advocacy.

So would he ever give up the law and become a full-time comedian? O'Loghlin is not sure, it would depend on the right opportunities coming along.

One thing he is sure about is that his next standup show will not be focussing on the law; instead he plans to look at what will happen in the future.

"I thought it would be interesting to see how things will change in the next fifty years and do a take on predictors like Nostradamus."

And what do his colleagues in the law think of his dual career?

"When I started doing standup, other lawyers saw it as an amusing curiosity - now that I've started getting a bit of television and radio exposure, the attitude's changed and they take it, for want of a better word, a lot more seriously."

O'Loghlin will undoubtedly impress many more people in the future and is even thinking of writing a comic novel, having recently been approached by a Sydney publisher. His only hesitation is that he is used to getting immediate feedback from his audiences and fears he might become neurotic waiting for responses from readers of his novel.