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THE NAME'S THE THING - DAVE CALLAN - BY DEMETRIUS ROMEO - REVOLVER (30/07/01)

Dave Callan - an uncommon comic with a taste for word play.

’Are You Dave Gorman?’, arguably the best international show to feature at the Melbourne Comedy Festival this year, documented English comic Dave Gorman’s quest to find other people around the world who share his name. Melbourne’s ‘fluffiest’ comic, Dave Callan, could see his point; throughout the festival he kept running into people who either shared his name or variations thereof : the significantly less hairy Sydney-based Dave Callan was down there doing a show, as was fellow Melbournian Damian Callinan, whose name is close enough to cause confusion.

“I’m not sure why, but my name seems to attract many imitator,” admits fluffy Dave. The confusion began in high school when he was in the same class as David Callahan. “I was just flabbergasted when I met David Callan. I didn’t think it was that common a name. I got to say, ‘Hello Dave Callan, how are you?’ which was a first for me.” By the end of the festival, he and the other Dave Callan had come to an informal agreement in order to make life easier. “Me and Dave…me and David, rather,” he says, “unofficially declared that I was ‘Dave’ Callan and he was ‘David’”.

Not just names, but words themselves have a great significance in Dave Callan’s humour. “You can certainly choose words that are funnier than others when making a sentence up,” he says, illustrating his three favourite words in the English language : ‘pant’, ‘trouser’ and ‘slack’. “They’re all ‘pant’ related’,” he explains. The emphasis of words as a source of humour dates back to Callan’s adolescence, although the humour itself started much earlier. When Dave was growing up in Ireland, he moved around a lot, so he was frequently picked on as ‘the new kid’. “To make friends quickly, I had to have something special, and developed my sense of humour,” he explains. Being “quite big and goofy”, he tended to be victimised by horrible little bastards who knew the “gentle giant” was unlikely to strike back. But the comic isn’t bitter. “I thanked them because it’s all worked out. I ended up developing quite a rapid sense of humour with them.”

Dave came to Perth, Australia at age fifteen, which was also difficult. “It’s a whole different country and I had a different accent. I played on the accent and tried to make them laugh so that they’d like me a bit more.” Like most kids, Callan was “incredibly nervous” and “terribly shy” when it came to public speaking. However, when he became a class prefect, one of his tasks was to make speeches, first in the classroom then in front of the school assembly. Realising that most students didn’t particularly want to listen, he “injected jokes” into what he had to say in order to win them over. “I’ve always loved the sound of laughter, so I tried to make it as entertaining as possible, and got a bit of a hunger for it.”

By the time Callan had left school and was going to see live stand-up as a punter, Perth had one sole comedy venue. It was here that Rove Mc Manus stood up one week, as part of a double act. “I saw it and thought, ‘they’re having great fun; I need to be doing that too’,” says Dave. And so he did. After nine gigs, he was a working comic. Like all Perth comics, Callan eventually needed to move to a bigger town with a more established comedy scene that could ensure financial and creative security. Melbourne was the place.

Most non-Melbournites know Callan only through the two seasons he spent working on old friend Rove’s television show. At the end of its second season, Dave had decided to concentrate on his “first love”, live performance, once again. “Though I love the show and miss the people on it,” he explains, “I needed to take a break and decided the only way to do that was to move on and do my own thing.” Callan returned to live work with a vengeance : in addition to his own comedy festival show this year, ‘Dave Callan is Hairy’, he was a part of ‘Jesus Christ, Movie Star’ with two other comics. Callan’s dedicated fans are happy. So is Dave. “I get to see audiences more frequently,” he says, “and I’m well in favour of that.”

Future televison work is not out of the question though. “While I am doing live work, which is my bread and butter, I’m beavering away on the computer,” Dave reports. He has hit upon an “absolutely brilliant” sitcom idea, albeit one that is “quite obscure and unusual” and “incredibly ambitious”. He is pleased to be able to balance his live work with this project. “If you’re just working on your material all the time, you burn out and you don’t write much new stuff,” he argues. “But if you’ve got something else to take your focus away for a little while, you come back to your stand-up all fresh and rested, and vice-versa. It’s a real healthy way to work : have a few projects on the burner at all times.”

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