Bit of Shush

Daniel Connell is around 195 cm tall and he gets a lot of dumb comments because of it.  ‘Bet you got a great view from up there, mate,’ etc.  Irritating, eh?  Especially when what Daniel Connell really wants is just a bit of shush – and that is so hard to find these days.  You go for a quiet dinner at your local Indian restaurant – and there’s a f**king snake charmer!  A middle-of-the-day tram that should be real quiet has a mad woman on it, shouting in people’s faces, ‘I do what I want!’ 

Mr Connell appears like a pretty normal bloke in his check flannel shirt and jeans; he’s laid-back and affable, he gives fulsome (if ironic) praise to his techie, Hannah. But there are few things about the modern world that really, really piss him right off – and every now and then you glimpse that exasperated fury behind the grin.  That’s why he’s funny. Things like hoons in cars, dickheads in general, bullying dads at junior soccer and Elon Musk claiming we all live in a simulated reality. The last is disproved by the existence of said dickheads because what mighty intellect would simulate them?  Oh, for a bit of shush!  

‘Shush’ is a word I’ve not heard for quite a while.  Is it archaic?  (Shush, noun, quiet; shush, verb, signal or order to be quiet.)  But there’s a lot words like that here, used completely naturally, without self-consciousness, and the old-fashioned, country pub yarn is characteristic of the show.  The twist is that there’s a twist to the yarns, an unexpected sting in the tail.  Here’s an example from one of Daniel Connell’s routines from previous years (he’s been doing stand-up since 2009), so as not to spoil this year’s show.  It begins, as so many of his yarns do, as a sort of mildly exasperated complaint.  Whenever he goes to a nightclub, he’s the bloke women ask to mind their handbag while they go on the dance floor.  This sounds like the predictable set-up for a bewildered ‘why me?’  What is it about me that makes women ask me to mind their handbags?  Why don’t they ask me to dance?  

After a perfectly timed pause, he goes on instead, ‘Yeah, I’ve stolen thousands of dollars like that... And that mango lip gloss?  Got stacks of them…’

And then, after another pause, he reports that a mate explained that he gets to mind the handbags because he’s tall.  When the women are on the dance floor and a bit ‘disorientated’, they know where their bag is because Mr Connell towers over the crowd.  Sure enough, he looks around and sees four or five other tall blokes… with handbags at their feet. 

Chances are he’ll circle around and come back to those handbags and tall blokes later, attaching the reference to something else entirely.  Of course, this kind of pay-off and back reference and the surprising but perfect twists are just delightful and satisfying – and so he keeps you laughing for his entire fifty-eight minutes - or, as he says, fifty-three if you don’t laugh.  We laughed. Me? All the way through.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Nicole Reed