MIKE SHANAHAN
I first saw Mike Shanahan it must have been around 2001-2. I'd stopped doing that three times a week open mike bullshit and I must have seen him at the Chardons Corner Hotel one Thursday night. I even took my best mate Terry Mays to come along one night to see him.Terry had the same verdict as me and that was although his material isn't great he had the ability to make ok material get bigger laughs than it deserved. He has the ability to draw you in. He has charisma.
His looks and style are both similar to Will Ferrell and Tom Gleeson if you can see a connection between those two. So I befriended him which was a strange thing to do because I had no friends in the comedy scene. It's funny putting that in writing because after a few years you'd think there'd be someone but there was no one until Mike. I'll say this, I'm happy that he was the one.
So when my gets on stage he is droll. He can stand up there and get laughs before he opens his mouth. Then he comes out with his continual barrage of one liners. The he does a few bits like his crush on Sandra Sully and back to the one liners. His one liners are extremely different from mine so I give him a lot of material that is in his vein.
Now I know I have a particular funny way of saying things but it never became so clear when one night Mike asked me along to a gig at Wynnum. He had a 25minute set, must have been the headliner this night and he did his usual stuff , Sandra Sully etc but then he started doing my material. BUT it wasn't my material, he was just quoting things I'd said in conversations my normal talk. My normal talk was his routine. I wasn't angry, i wanted to be but I wasn't . So he eh finishes his stet walks off the stage and says 'Thanks for all the material. I said "that's not material, that's me talking".
BUT we haven't done a great detail.
So we a C.D of stuff, written by both us. That in itself was good. here's the weird thing, I thought the C.D was pretty good technically but Mike didn't so we didn't pursue it's release. It's funny enough.
We did four years of a show at 1197 SWITCH on a Sunday night. That would have continued but they changed location to a shed behind Indooroopilly golf club and I lost interest quickly.
I wrote some sketches which we performed with Mark Arabin and filmed one Saturday. Now some of them are on You Tube and they funny but not funny enough because something happened. We did a lot of sketches, no more than 15 seconds each and we were all laughing loud. But when Phil the cameraman gave us the tapes back most of it was missing as if he's forgotten to to turn the camera on.
I actually created this style called the 4 liner and I knew we had over 20 of these but once we started Mike and Mark started making their own contribution. These sketches often had the punchline "we go fuck yourself then" Sounds funny - No . Was funny -Yes.
A few years later Mike and I went to a recording studio to do some sketches. This is where I fall down as a person, seriously. I went to the studio to do an edit with the 'producer'. Actually I thought I was the producer. So she says to me it's complete and I watched the finished product and I was mortified. Each sketch had it's title across the screen and there was this vaudevillian style curtain around each sketch. That's not my product. I internalize my thoughts and anger. I should have said 'Can you delete those curtains' that's probably all I needed to say. I didn't think of it because I thought she has gone to a lot of work here. Maybe it was as easy as hitting a delete button. I was so devastated really I couldn't say anything.
I am looking at stuff like it's set in the 1920's when I wanted it to look low budget but edgy. What's edgy about a fucking curtain. Mike has put some of them on his You Tube page but I wanted to burn them. I gave her the $1200 for 2 hours studio time plus editing and left. But this is the "Me" I live with weak and insecure. BUT back to Mike.
Mike was one of the co stars in IT'S BRISBANE TONITE WOW. I wanted him to be the lead role but Scot McPhie insisted on me.It should have been him.
In all my scripts there is a place for him as one of the lead roles.
Anyway Mike is a very good comedian, a good bloke and a great friend.
When i write my scripts now
