As a crime buff, comedian Kieran Butler became, like so many people, invested in the Erin Patterson mushroom murder case.
But he found himself laughing out loud when it emerged that health professionals initially thought Patterson’s victims had eaten daffodil bulbs.
The reason behind his mirth was that the year before, Butler had eaten a daffodil bulb he and his wife had mistaken for an onion.
“We’d moved to a regional town where people with a bunch of excess produce would leave it at the post office for people to take for free – oranges, various other fruits and vegetables,” Butler said.
“My wife picked this thing up and said, what do you reckon this is? So she cooked it up, and the long and short of it was that I nearly died that night.
“When you’re dying from ingesting a daffodil bulb, there are a lot of hallucinations going on.
“I recognised pretty quickly that this was a trip of some description; at one stage my dog was hanging off the ceiling. But it was a trip that had that sharp edge, where if you don’t throw up this daffodil bulb, you’re probably going to die.”
That experience is now part of his family’s pantheon of legends, but it also forms the backbone of Butler’s new show, Dickhead Dad: Where’s the Beef, Wellington?, which he will perform at this year’s Geelong Comedy Festival.
He said performing at the festival last year was a “terrific experience”.
“The audiences were really, really receptive…and I can see it’s really growing,” he said.
“You can see comedy starting to seed itself in various regional centres, I think it’s all going in the right direction.”
Kieran Butler is at The Geelong Club on Sunday 2 November. Visit geelongcomedyfestival.com.au for more information.
