Absurd: Comedian Lawrence Mooney.
By Cherie Donnellan
MELBOURNE funnyman Lawrence Mooney confesses to having a “sense of the absurd” – and he thinks Geelong people have it, too.
Mooney recalled driving past North Geelong’s Ray’s Outdoors with a sign out front saying ‘Now is the winter of our discount tent’, to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Richard III.
“I thought ‘There’s a sign of life here’ and I laughed. I loved it,” he recollected.
Mooney said he was “looking forward” to performing stand-up alongside Steele Saunders and Geelong-bred comedians Greg Fleet and Pete Sharkey at Courthouse Arts next Friday.
“I haven’t decided what I’m going to throw at the folks of Geelong yet,” Mooney confessed.
But he said audiences could expect “heaps of memories” and “pure gold”.
“We’re going to have some fun.”
Despite earning numerous awards during his comedy career, Mooney joked about not having a “real job” since his stint as a high-rise window cleaner in 1998.
Trying to define a real job, he reminisced that his daughter provided the definition.
“When you get out of bed early, put on a suit and leave the house,” she told him as an eight-year-old.
Mooney also has actor, social commentator and writer listed on his resume. He “loved doing them” but conceded they “weren’t jobs”.
Mooney recently co-hosted a 2012 London Paralympics ABC2 evening show, which shed “comedy, lightness and humanity” on paralympians.
“Several paralympians told me that people stiffen up around them and speak to them like they have intellectual disabilities.
“When we met them throughout the games they all had a degree of irreverence about their own disabilities and made jokes which showed just how normal they were.
“It was fantastic to speak to them and laugh with them.”
Mooney joked that he was typecast in his acting roles.
“I was recently shooting, playing an English teacher that deals smack to kids – what a role,” he laughed.
“I’m never going to get cast in the romantic roles because I’m known as the funny guy with the funny face.”
Mooney will perform at Courthouse Arts on October 26.
