Melbourne<\/a> comedy festival (\u201cMe and my mate used to walk home and kick all the bins over\u201d), where this year his show \u2013 aptly titled Out of Touch \u2013 fills the ornate and stately Regent Theatre every night. It\u2019s fitting that the audience for those shows sits in roomy leather upholstery while he\u2019s on stage telling us how bad he is at managing all the money he makes. Also fitting: that the man seated in front of me on opening night was Googling \u201cTom Gleeson net worth\u201d before the lights went down.<\/p>\n\u201cI guess the show probably should be called Out of Touch \u2013 in brackets and self-aware. The self-awareness kind of wrecks it, doesn\u2019t it?\u201d<\/p>\n
double quotation markI\u2019m just mocking their visage or their facade \u2026 and I\u2019m prepared to be critiqued the same way<\/p>\n
It also would make it something of an apology for Gleeson\u2019s brutal brand of honesty. But isn\u2019t that the real joy of watching him work? It\u2019s thrilling to hear a celebrity refuse to pussyfoot around, say, Karl Stefanovic\u2019s alleged party-boy reputation. If a Hard Quiz contestant seems particularly intense and geeky about a sci-fi subject, he\u2019ll point out how nerdy it is. The magic trick of his comedy isn\u2019t being unfiltered and a bit nasty, it\u2019s having such a finely tuned filter that he can come out on the other side of a roast and still be likable.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I\u2019ve got to weigh up entertainment versus hurting people\u2019s feelings, I\u2019ll pick entertainment every day of the week,\u201d he says. \u201cBut as time wears on \u2013 I might be deluded \u2013 but I feel people know that I\u2019m coming from a good place.\u201d<\/p>\n
He\u2019s earnest and specific, holding eye contact even as we walk alongside one another. \u201cI\u2019m just mocking their visage or their facade. I\u2019m not really mocking who they are as people. I\u2019m not saying stuff that\u2019s deeply personal. I\u2019m usually just making jokes about decisions they\u2019re made or opinions they\u2019re there, and I\u2019m prepared to be critiqued the same way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Out of Touch plays at the Melbourne comedy festival until Sunday. Photograph: Charlie Kinross\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
We start our walk down a Fitzroy sidestreet lined with compact little workers\u2019 cottages, the kind that come with million-dollar price tags that belie their working-class origins.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s here that Gleeson shared a home with his wife, Ellie Parker. Even 20 years on, he remembers the exact amount of rent he paid to live here \u2013 and in the apartment before it. He remembers being booted out so the landlord\u2019s son could move in, and the year-long feud he had with the landlord at his next place. \u201cSo I bought a house in Romsey out of spite \u2013 to spite him, specifically. I don\u2019t want to have a landlord ever again.\u201d<\/p>\n
He was working on Triple M, hosting the evening show Tom & Subby, and starring on Skithouse when he lived in the sweet little house with a door that opens on to the footpath. He calls it his and Parker\u2019s \u201cfirst proper house\u201d. He hosted his 30th birthday and a Kevin 07 election-night party here. Pickering stayed in the loft upstairs when he\u2019d \u201crun out of money\u201d and moved back from a stint in London. \u201cI charged him rent too,\u201d Gleeson says, laughing into his coffee.<\/p>\n
Money comes up often during our walk. As well as his rent, Gleeson remembers exactly how much he charged high schoolers to tutor them when he was a uni student, \u201con a collision course to becoming a maths teacher\u201d. He\u2019d been white-knuckling a degree in pharmacy while earning $450 a week off the books with his daily tutoring rounds \u2013 \u201cI\u2019d get the parents to pay in advance.\u201d When he started doing comedy gigs and was offered drinks and flights and $100 to host open mics, the numbers made sense, and so a career in standup did, too.<\/p>\n
\u201cI really hate to say this because it\u2019s about someone who works in commercial radio being right,\u201d he says, in what might be one of the best disclaimers anyone\u2019s ever given on the record, \u201cbut there was an executive at Triple M who said something like, \u2018You either have to be talking about sex, money or dieting. That\u2019s it. It\u2019s the only things people care about.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Gleeson bristled against what he thought were reductive formulas for entertainment at the time. \u201cBut when I was putting [Out of Touch] together, I realised it\u2019s a show\u2019s about money and my relationship to it. And it\u2019s instantly interesting to me because you\u2019re not supposed to talk about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a nippy Melbourne morning, with a blue sky on one side of the road and pewter-coloured rain clouds hovering at our backs as we walk down Brunswick Street, with Gleeson pointing out the bars and restaurants he once frequented. \u201cThe Black Cat\u2019s still there. It\u2019s funny, for all the time I lived here, I never really went there because, even back then, it was just a bit too cool.\u201d<\/p>\n
Talking publicly about earning too much money during a cost-of-living crisis \u2018breaks all the rules\u2019, Gleeson says. Photograph: Charlie Kinross\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
Gleeson enjoys coming back to his old stomping ground but has grown used to the quiet of Romsey, a town of fewer than 5,000 people about an hour\u2019s drive north. \u201cI\u2019ve become such a country hick that when I come back here, I tend to notice all the graffiti and the vomit on the ground and rubbish and stuff. In Romsey there is graffiti but I probably know who did it. \u2018Oh, vomit. Oh, that\u2019s a friend of mine\u2019s from last night.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
After his show takes him through regional Australia, Gleeson will return to the studios where he hosts Hard Quiz and Taskmaster in front of live audiences with a new metric for how much brashness an audience can stomach. He says he finds all the classic maxims of a television host \u2013 to make an audience feel welcome, to take them by the hand, to be a good guest in their lounge rooms \u2013 a bit corny.<\/p>\n
Talking publicly about earning too much money during a cost-of-living crisis, he says, \u201cbreaks all the rules. That is not what a TV host should be doing. You are not supposed to be doing that. You are supposed to be humble. You\u2019re supposed to be grateful that you\u2019re there, privileged that you were offered the job, all these things. And when everyone says that over and over again, it just sounds boring.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo me, it\u2019s suddenly funny to say the opposite.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As we walk down the top end of Collins Street, past the Rolex store on one side and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":397960,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[458,146,85,46],"class_list":{"0":"post-397959","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-israel"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=397959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397959\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/397960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=397959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=397959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=397959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}