With performances on "The Big Gig" and live shows all around the country over the last couple of years the Doug Anthony Allstars have been cracking big crowds and selling loads of merchandise. Their first publication, cryptically entitled Book, leapt off the shelves and into the hands of customers and in 1991 the ABC broadcast their own personal innovative television show- "DAAS Kapital".

I caught up with Paul McDermott in his third floor loft in the very centre of Melbourne's CBD. Surrounded by collages, constructions and posters in the unmistakable pop Weimar style of his black and white work in Book, McDermott hospitably poured a cup of tea in a Bunnykins cup- as, coincidentally, Michael Leunig had done earlier inthe day. Notorious for his ferocity on stage, the other Paul McDermott is awry, softly spoken fellow- so softly spoken in fact that at times he was barely audible on the tape. I wanted in particular to ask him about his views on the politics of comedy, but we first began with some Allstars history. M.B

We met in Canberra. Richard and Tim had been working for a while. I was in an art school group called Gigantic Fly. We were doing plays, little comedic, fifteen-minute frantic things based on the original 1940s version of Cat People, or Damn Busters. There was this guy called Bill Newman who was wonderful to work with. I'd been doing that for a couple of years just on the streets or anywhere we could do sows. I met the Dougs and didn't like what they were doing at the time at all! They were singing and very energetic with a similar format to what we are doing now. I needed the money and they were doing a lot of shows. They were a trio at the time...

So there was a fourth Beatle?
Yeah. I think there still could be one in the group too - I'm not sure which one. The guy who was working with them went off to study mime in Paris and learnt to play the flute properly.

So by 1986 you were looking for opportunities outside Canberra?
We finished our courses in 1985 so we didn't have anymore commitments in Canberra. We got a show together properly and started writing material rather than standing on street corners making it up as we went along, or rehearsing five minutes before we went to town. We used to invent things onthe street and if it worked we put it in the show. A lot of people found us very aggressive at first.This was because if you come from a busking tradition you really have to grab the attention of the audience because if you don't, you don't get their money and you don't feed yourself in that week. That aggression was coming out because we were interested in people watching us. Transferring that to a theatre show, where people couldn't get away, made it seem more aggressive than most acts aroundat the time. That interested audiences.

And you as well, to put on a mask?
Oh yeah, I'm a very aggresive person as you know.

What effect did moving to television have on the way you work?
Television gives you a very limited time to get ideas across. In a live show we had ninety minutes to two hours. On "The Big Gig", to start with, we only had three minutes. So you just home in on one specific thing and build up the imagery you'd like to associate with those ideas- and the jokes, if there are any there at the time.

What about your time at the Edinburgh Festival?
We went over to Edinburgh in 1987. We wanted to goover in '86 but there wasa slight act of deception by our agents at the time. They told us they were booking us in- which they didn't do. We confronted them and they said they hadn't booked us, that it was a big world out there and we were being too ambitious and so on. We said: "We're young, we're meant to be ambitious. We shouldn't wait for things, we should go out there and make them happen". Anyway we went... [McDermott empties his teapot out the window into the Swanston Street alleyway.] It hits the street out there. You do it in the morning and you hear the garbos yell out: "Get fucked". The first thing we did when we got to London was to go straight to Covent Garden. Fortunately it was a Sunday so we were in luck. There were buskers everywhere. We had to go and check out with the busking authorities to see if we could play. Tim flirted outrageously and managed to get us a site to perform on and we didn't have to do the normal two week audition. We got this great space at Covent Garden and spent two weeks there before theEdinburgh Festival. That was quite an eye-opener as well because we were suddenly making a lot of money busking, enough to exist in London anyway.There was this great fraternity of buskers there which we never knew about in Australia - professional buskers. They were a great help to us and showed us the tricks of the trade. The weird thing is we meet these people all over the world. We get to Montreal and there'll be buskers we met in San Francisco or you go to Paris or Amsterdam they'll be working the streets. That's quite incredible and something we were totally oblivious to in Australia because it was always such a lone profession. The standard of buskers here used to be someone with a couple of Neil Young or Bob Dylan songs and that was it.

So you found buskers who would choose to do it rather than be in some kind of commercial hierachy?
People enjoyed it, liked the freedom. After that we went to Edinburgh. We only had a show that ran for a week because everything was booked out-we booked ourselves in so late. We performed a lot of free shows and benefits so that word on us by the end was quite big. We were the only group to appear twice on the Scottish TV program covering the Fringe. We were invited back, which was unheard of.

You were discovering that not only did you have a distinctive mix in Australia but in Edinburgh as well?
Yeah, we could work there. They understood the humour. Our stuff has never been local. It's the one thing that separates us from a lot of other comics. We satirise very broad aspects of society. There's not a lot of local references in the show and if there are they can be changed. I've seen a lot of comics from Australia, and from other places, go overseas and it falls down because all their references are local ones.

Perhaps it's the rock and roll aspect of your work, it's transportable.
I think the music is a great transport. Certainly it enables you to go to places that other comedians couldn't go - and do things that sometimes you wouldn't get away with otherwise.

So who is your audience?
That's interesting. When we first started as buskers it was anyone between 3 and 83, they were some of the best shows we had. I remember one in Canberra- busking away and I had this pair of old shoes on. They were worn through and the laces were gone and I was dancing away this winklepickerjust went flying into the air. To save myself the disgrace and embarrassment I asked all the children to place their shoes in the guitarcase as a symbol of solidarity with me. Suddenly all these kids took off their shoes and cajoled their parents to do the same, so the guitarcase was full of shoes. You can't get that with a theatre audience - it's got to be something impromptu on the streets. During the Edinburgh festival we had people who were like-minded between 20 and 40. Television has been the great leveller for us. Anyone could turn it on and anyone could watch it so we've had a lot of people distorting what we believed we were doing. And the age group has dropped dramatically - from that twenties, mid twenties and thirties which was our standard - to anything around 15 to 20. So we now get audiences of a lot of 15-year-olds and they can't understand a word, they don't understand the references and the jokes we do.In a way they were feeding us for a while in the liveshows. They weren't laughing at the jokes, they were screaming at jokes. And we thought: This is stupid, it's exactly what we didn't want to happen and for a while we were seriously thinking about packing it up and saying: 'This is no good, this idolatry phenomenon which we quite despise'. So we changed from doing theatres back to doing licensed venues. They can't get in there. So it's much easier. We are also leaving the country more often and working overseas. Working bigger venues changed our dynamics. In a small club you can prowl the audience more effectively. Working a small audience has a different atmosphere. You work in a different way. There's a lot of manipulation to see how people react. The aspect of group hysteria is something that has really fascinated us - from religious hysteria to political hysteria. Working with large crowds you can build it up to more of a fever pitch. It seems that the more people involved or whatever, the more exciting it becomes for a large crowd. So when we did the splitting up of the audience into different factions and played them off against each other, in smaller venues it was great,they'd be a really strong atmosphere there, but with some ofthe large audiences it was just incredible. You could really feel that it was quite volatile.

You'd unleashed more than you could put back in the box?
Yeah. [Laughs]

You were actually generating things rather than satirising them?
Yes. That's the funny thing too. Once we used to have to fight to get the audiences to listen to us. Now we don't, which is like half the fun taken out for us because the enjoyment was in appearing like three bastards with views that made the audience think, or whatever.

With your shock tactics, I imagine people are rarely indifferent to you. Do you feel any impulse to make absolutely clear what your politics are?
I don't believe there's any need on our part to do that. It would be like explaining a painting. If people don't feel or understand then telling them that it was painted in the 16th century and that it has four hundred different layers of meaning isn't going to help them understand it any better. I've always disliked being heavy-handed about things. You see so many people preaching on stage and it's just not what we want to do. There is some confusion about our political bias or what we actually believein - which is fun. It means you can always turn your work against yourself, contradict yourself, exaggerate, extrapolate. When we started out as buskers we used to have a big following from the left in Canberra, among socialist groups and so on. We had several songs about Nicaragua and for a while we were the pets of these cliques. Then one day we were collecting the money and some boy rode up ona bicycle and said: 'Do you give that all to Direct Action or something?' and we said: 'No, this is our wage, this is why we do it, to make money'. And he said: 'Oh, so you've sold out the left'. Then a week later a woman on a bicycle went by and said she didn't like the way we handled a situation where I was Joan of Arc and Ijumped into a flaming bin and made jokes about it and she thought that was a contemptible way of ridiculing the work of a great woman. And we said: 'Weare not here to espouse other people's attitudes, we're not the mouth piece of the left or for other group. We are our own mouth piece and if no one knows what thoughts are coming through that mouth at any particular time it gives us greater possibility to play with.

That non-alignment of the comic or jester has always made foolery a dangerous occupation.
That's when it works best. I can always remember when we went to Britain and did shows with the Comedy Store in London. They'd seen us at the '87 festival and we'd been on 'Friday Night Live' which is the show 'The Big Gig' is based on. The only reason we have 'The Big Gig' in Australia is that Wendy Harmer brought back the tape because she was on the show as well. Ted Robinson looked at it and said: 'Who are these guys- are they from New Zealand?' And she said they were from Melbourne. The only reason we were onhis program was because he'd seen us on a show from overseas. Anyway, getting back to the Club. Everybody there was doing anti-Thatcher material, which we thought was a cop-out. We were playing in venues where everyone basically dislikes Thatcher because they can't see any solution over there.So we went on as a group of larrikin, loud mouthed Australian and said that Thatcher was the best thing that ever happened to Britain and they should be grateful to have a woman of her power and political strength at the helm of their ship. This drew cries of hatred from the audience who started abusingand yelling. We'd smile and say: 'No, it's true. You wouldn't keep voting her back if it wasn't true'. Then we just raved about how good she was for the Conservative Party. The thing was, you got a reaction from the audience. Most of the time English comics were getting up saying; "Thatcher, what a bitch'- and getting pleasant rounds of applause. But the people don't think about it.

Are you closer to performance art? The usual expectation of comics is that they will collud with the audience, certainly not threaten their psychological sagety.
There are lots of different kinds of comedy. There's the- 'you know what it's like when you go down the shops' kind, where you empathise with the comic and you're going in to the shop with him to get the sausage roll and it's very comical. But I can't see how that is progressive. But when you take people beyond their immediate surroundings you can challenge them.

Are there some things which aren't funny?
I think with anyone there are things that aren't funny, that you draw the line at. But it's a personal line. I could make jokes about things we believe are sacred, at the same time pushing the boundaries of our own acceptance.

So you might be in the process of finding out that on stage?
Some things will come out of your mouth and you'll think: Oh my God. But anything can be made funny. Its time that makes tragedy comical. Like any assassination - given time, people will come out with jokes about them. When Lockerbie happened, within twenty-four hours we were making jokes. People go 'gasp' at the time but they're willing to laugh about it once the newspapers have forgotten it. Before Tiananmen Square happened we actually though the tanks would go through, so we did this thing on 'The Big Gig' when we came through the floor and ploughed everyone down with machineguns. In a weeks time that happened. So you are playing with fire, especially if you are doing it in live shows as contemporary as 'The Big Gig' is. People see these things as incredibly bad taste but it's also a matter of saying to people; 'Where's your conscience about this?' It's enough to make you feel bad if you laugh at this twenty-four hours after it happens. But a week later everybody's making jokes and then a month later it's dinner party conversation.

Is part of the process to find somethings that aren't funny?
Like what?

Somebody says 'I don't think that it's funny to laugh at that event or calamity' and the answere is 'no, it's not'.
Yeah, that's true. It's great when people come up and they don't find that funny. I don't care if they don't. But if they can explain why they didn't- it's actually quite good to hear people say:'I'm going to make a statement about this. I'm not going to sit back and take it.' Not in an aggressive way, but in a rational way. It's incredible that there are so many irrational people about. We used to get hoard sof letters from Hervey Bay, Queensland, telling us how much they despised 'The Big Gig'. They'd write in regularly signed by thirty people, protesting what we'd done about Catholicism. It was quite beautiful because it said: 'We the undersigned think that this program should not be on the ABC, particularly the Doug Anthony Allstars because of their attitudes and so on' and 'Because we're so disgusted we're not going to watch 'The Big Gig' anymore'. They went into a bit of a waffle and said: 'We'll continue viewing this show just to make sure nothing else happens!' So many contradictions in the space of oneletter.

In the United States there has been a lot of backlash comedy, the ugly stuff - a lot of it directed against women. Does that phenomenon trouble you?
I think American comedy on the whole is pretty infantile anyway. There are a couple of brilliant stand ups but the great amount don't understand satire and irony. You're talking about people like Andrew Dice Clay?

Yes, who've got a whole constituency who are waiting for permission to denigrate women again. I'm think particularly about the implications of sexism.
We used to be charged with sexism because there wasn't a woman in the group. There were three boys- women would ask why there weren't any women inthe group.

I'm well aware that there is a lot of earnestness about this. But how do you judge where one person's irony is another persons literal statement?
I don't have any comedy records and I don't listen to them. I'm not interested in doing that- nor are Richard and Tim. But I know about Andrew Dice Clay because of articles I've read about him and I saw one brief live thing he did for MTV which must have been censored. I think with that limited experience of his work what motivates him is pure unadulterated shock value and a whole group of misogynistically oriented people will enjoy that because it basically agrees with their attitudes. So he can get up andsay that all women are bitches or some such derogatory term and they'll allagree with him like they would if they went to a stadium and like it when someone has a touchdown. You don't hear many people laugh at his jokes. It's like 'Donahue', they're all yipping and yahooing, it's agreeance comedy. Agreeance- what a disgusting word that is too. I think that's what he and Sam Kinison are about. I think Kinison is slightly better. There's something really angry about his work. It has a lot of venom against American society as a whole. He doesn't limit himself. Whereas I think Andrew Dice Clay is very limiting in his character and his orientation is a mistake.I think with any work, though, you can say certain things about the mental attitude behind them. There's a comedian in Britain, a Glaswegian called Gerry Sadowitz, an extremely aggressive comic we've worked with a couple of times. He'll come out and do the most horrendous, offensive jokes but I think he works from the attitude that the world is a fucked place. He'll make jokes about any racial minority, or gender. It's like one big offensive blast and people either like it or they don't, but the thing is, he doesn't differentiate. Everyone's fucked.

Ataud talks about theatre as a plague purging the society. Should comedy be plague too?
It really would be good if it was more like a virus. A lot of comedy is too laid back, it doesn't go far enough. There's always another boundary you can cross. New theatre is a bit woeful at the moment too. We got reviewed bythe Times- or maybe the Guardian- in '88. It was very complimentary but it was by a theatre critic. Normally you get reviewed by a garden specialist, a herbologist. They come along and they don't really understand but they think: It makes me laugh, and give you a good review. But they don't look any deeper. Anyway, this reviewer was giving an honest appraisal of the work as work and not just as comedy or cabaret or something. And she was saying that in Britain there had been a wasteland, she'd got so bored with the hundred and thirty-nine plays in the Fringe that she'd gone to see some comedy and said this is probably the vanguard of new theatre because it is pushing the boundaries and making people think- all the things theatre should do. It shouldn't be complacent. There's this big wave of conservatism over everything at the moment and people are doing the same old thing.

You seem to use the 20th century as a rumagebin, the Dougs are covered in badges, you work in collage.
We did an ad for ourselves saying we were the first eclectic group of the nineties. A lot of our stuff was pillaging, not from comedy sources but from any period that has interested us. Art changes every ten years. Look at the Post-Impressionists, then Dada, Surrealists. There's a new field every ten years taking over. By the sixties every five years and it the seventies, they've thrown away the paintbrush and no one knows how to prime a canvas anymore. All the old ways are lost in a wave of new thought. The same thing was happening in the literary world. There was such a deviant bent, stream-of-consciousness writing was everywhere. You can't get much farther out into that realm. Now it's a matter offinding what you can pillage from other periods.

You seem to have gone to the bitter, scathing forms of clowing - as a way of surfacing things. Your moment has turned out to be a lot of people's moment.
We enjoy doing live work a lot and we still invent alot of stuff off the cuff. Going back to clubs is good. We started doing theatres because the comedy circuit got very enclosed. Comedy is like any organisation - it's got the dead wood, hangers-on, promoters, agents. It has become lucrative. We wanted to break out of that. That was about two years ago. We've done our own promotion, designed our own posters. That's when we hired theatres for ourselves. TV had just started and there was a bit of demand.

Do audiences vary - are there regional differences?
Certain people will understand certain things. You discover very quickly what the level is. At Taree we went out for the first hour of the show we seemed to sailing out into this great abyss over people's heads and we didn't understand what we were doing wrong. We had this thing Tim used to do which was a school teacher, parental - 'Ayayayayay'. It was a joke at the time because we wanted to see how quickly it would take off as a catchcry. You know how comedians on television rely heavily on catchcries. This one took about three weeks before cab drivers were yelling it on the street or you heard it in playgrounds. Then we just stopped doing it because part of the experience was over, just to get people doing it,then we didn'thave to do it anymore. This was a good two years ago. Then Tim just went click - "Ayayayayay". Cheers, streamers, the boat went out. That was something they recognised. We were lucky enough to find that in the next week in Taree was a thing called Beef Week where there was the celebration of the carcass. They had things like Tuesday April 14: Carcass Viewing; April 15: the Hoof Parade. So for about half an hour wejust talked about Beef Week and there were showbags with offal for the kiddies, play things like that. Sometimes it's just finding where the audience is and if you want to play to that you can, if you don't want to, you don't.

So what about when you single somebody out for attention. Someone with long hair, say?
[Scrutinising interviewer]...or a beard... earring, glasses, Reeboks...?

Do you ever find that you have to rein that back in again. That person starts to get lost in space?
What do you mean?

That they are maginalised. That you are feasting on them?
Oh yes. In the end it's their own fault for being there. I loathe audience participation. I hate it when people came anywhere near me. I get the jitters.

So it's an outward projection of your deepest resentment...?
[Laughs] I'm glad you can see it like that. There was one instance in Britain when a young comedian was in one of our shows at the Fringe Club. It's a wild place. There are two levels and hundreds of mean Scots in a place as large as a good toilet block. You get rained on with beer if they don't like you. There are some of the meanest hecklers I've ever heard. One guy came on and said: 'I'm a schizophrenic' and this Scotsman yells back : 'Well why don't you and your friend fuck off?' That place was the real blood sports of comedy. An Australian comrade went there, just off the plane, and said: 'It's great to be standing on English soil'. They just threw beer all over him. I won't mention who it was but he'll recognise it if he ever reads this. Back to the story. We used to do this thing called'Runaround Sue' wherewe'd get thirteen people from the audience and do the standard thing of running round getting people's names. We got them to do a can-can behind uson stage. It was a very basic busking thing- if you took one member of the family, the rest of the family had to stay. We just transferred it to the club. This boy was there and we hauled him up onstage. He was a bit slow in reacting and we did the usual- he can't remember his name and so on. Anyway we generally humiliated him and degraded him and discovered a year later that he was doing a whole sketch about this experience with us. I suppose it was beneficial to him because he got some material... sometimes people will draw attention to themselves for a reason. It's not totally discriminatory.

The sense of danger is intrinsic to the performance, isn't it?
Yes. You can tell people not to sit near the front row but they still do it.

Do you have more travel plans? What about the US?
We'd love to. We've done the Montreal Comedy Festival where you get some of the American comics. Some are very weird shit. We got a brief inkling about the way the Americans - and Canadians - react. I shouldn't lump them together but the audiences in New York were very similar. They really like things they had seen before, but we were hosting a show at the Club Soda and before we'd introduce an act they'd say: 'I was on "Letterman", and I did "The Carson Show", I was on "Solid Gold" as the comedian'. We'd introducethem saying: 'This guy was on "Letterman"'. 'Yay',cheering. 'He was on Carson'. 'Yay'. I mean, imagine here 'I was on Ray Martin and Steve Vizard?' Do you think people are going to be impressed by that? We did the Nasty Show in Montreal, thinking Nasty meant some aggressive stuff or doing someone doing political humour that's not apologetic, not like: 'George Bush, what an asshole. But seriously - I think the guys great'. All the stuff was like that. We thoughts we'd get someone with a bit of intestinal fortitude, a bit of strength. But the show just turned out to be a blue show with sexist and racist comments. They were popular comedians, some of the more disgusting Montreal double acts. We were compering the show and everyone would come on and say; 'We love being here in Montreal' and add a smattering of French. We got up, the three of us, with: 'Fuck off, Montreal'. At which point you could hear a pin drop. Then: 'We've just been to Toronto, it was much better'. Pin drop. We went through the set and then backstage was a comic called Yid Vicous who was red with laughter. At least he thought it was funny. He'd never heard anyone insult the audience like that before. And he had an opening line like: 'I was fucking Mike Tyson up the butt, he ain't so tough...' Montreal was an eye-opener. Then we went to America and that was really weird. We played places like Catch a Rising Star and the comedians there all have ten minutes of material and the hone it and hone it until there is a laugh every thirty seconds. They're very professional about it. But so is a professional hot dog seller. And every hot dog is the same. Every act is the same. We came on, and they are not used to trios for a start, they're not even used to double acts, but a trio with music in a stand-up venue was seen as quite extraordinary.So the first thing, we go out and say: 'Australia dada da', and they just look at us totally confused. We didn't make a joke about a bagel in the first twenty seconds. We didn't say: 'Anyone here from Brooklyn?' In the end we just ended up satisfying ourselves, going on stage in Manhatten and saying: 'Anyone from Coober Pedy? Nup. Anyone from Tangawara...?' Event the parody songs were no better. It was like showing a mirror to a tribe in the Amazon. It made absolutely no sense to them. If we played at other venues and billed ourselves as performance art we'd do quite well because the journalists could then say: 'Oh, this is social commentary'. You could let the hyperbole do the rest. Also on the college circuit we'd get a different reaction. The comedy circuit is very specific - it's stand up in a certain style and we don't fit into that style at all. We did Dead Elvis in Montreal and people would come and say: 'What have you got against the King?' 'Nothing, I just thought it was funny at the time'. Melbourne, June 1991.