Sam Simmons: Champion of the Weird

When someone storms out of your show, it’s not often a mark of success. One gag beyond the pale, the failure to tame a restless crowd, a backfired exchange with the front row – fall into such traps and you could clear the room faster than a noxious fart. Most comics would find the experience hard to swallow. Not Sam Simmons. 

“That makes for a fucking great show,” says the Australian absurdist. “There’s an electricity in a show like that.”

In his case, walkouts don’t always mean he’s missed the mark. More often they are a byproduct of his extreme and divisive style, a sign that everything's in order with his prop-based idiocy, non-sequiturs and hyperactive song-and-dance. Delivered at breakneck pace, his comedy makes so little sense that it tends to antagonise those with less adventurous palates.

“The reaction? I think—I hope—I must elicit some sort of fear inside them,” he says, switching into a whingeing impersonation: “‘Let’s just get out of here. I don’t want to even engage with him. He’s weird’.”

There have been times when this fight-or-flight response has turned nasty, and the former zookeeper casually recounts being punched and wrestled off stage. Men, he says, are the least receptive to his shenanigans.

“I think it’s a threat to sexuality and stuff like that, because people say, ‘Look at him dancing onstage, he must be a faggot, mate’. It’s the general Australian rural consensus, and some nights in Edinburgh as well.”

Simmons speaks to Fest from the West Australian desert town of Carnarvon—“the middle of nowhere, quite literally”— where he is featuring in the Melbourne Comedy Festival Roadshow following his nomination for the coveted Barry Award.

Over the course of the nationwide tour he has seen the tide begin to turn, and even what he calls the “bogans” of Australia’s backwaters are warming to his new offering, Meanwhile. Here, for the first time, 34-year-old Simmons has written a show where nobody is walking out. Could it be that the mainstream is now ready for the uncompromising maniac behind last year’s exhilarating Fail?

Something of a sleeper hit, 2010’s nightmare game show was, in Simmons’ words, “a fantasy show about wanting to top yourself”. The tone was manic, claustrophobic and jarring even in its daftest moments, capturing the sense of a mind in chaotic decline. And, as it turns out, there was a pretty good reason for that.

“I was addicted to prescription drugs, like Elizabeth Taylor or some grand dame,” he says. “I never went into it in the show because I guess I was kind of in denial about it until after I finished the run, and then I went off and kind of got some help.

“It chemically fucked me up, so I think that’s where all the really dark thoughts were coming from. But then at the same time it means I wrote a really excellent show, stoned.”

His drugs of choice were Valium and Stilnox, a sleeping pill known elsewhere as Ambien. The latter inspired panic in Simmons’ current hometown of Sydney, after it was blamed for the death of a student who plunged from the city’s Harbour Bridge in 2008. Since then, the drug has carried warnings of side effects such as “sleep-walking, sleep-driving and other bizarre behaviours”.

But while lesser comics might need a skullful of something similarly potent to reach Simmons’ level of lunacy, “bizarre behaviours” come naturally to him. Don’t expect Meanwhile to be anything less than preposterous.

“I’ve now written a show that’s not been affected by anything,” he says. “I hope it makes sense.”

Based on past form, you can guarantee it won’t. Even in a lucid state, Simmons has always had a taste for the ridiculous, which owes less to his comedy forebears than it does to his childhood friends in Adelaide.

“We used to have this little collective. We would just be weird around the school to each other—we called it ‘being weak’—and I just grabbed it and took it onstage.”

Adulthood has done little to mellow Simmons and friends – even the bona fide grown-up now working at the South Australia Water Commission.

“Basically he’s so high up in government he allocates who goes through drought and who doesn’t, so you’ve got an idiot playing God,” Simmons laughs. “I’ve seen that man drag himself round hotel rooms pretending he has no legs for half the night!”

With a BBC project in the pipeline and his work on Australian radio going from strength to strength, Simmons doesn't see himself on the stage for many more years. He’s nearing the end of a zoology degree and, as a man who recently had a goat tattooed on his buttock, he's keen to find an outlet for his love of animals. It may not be long before he packs up his googly-eyed cabbage props and returns to the animal kingdom, through comedy or otherwise.

“I think I’m just going to do this really fucking crazy stuff while I’m young and then chill out," he says. "You can’t be a punk forever."

That word—punk could indeed describe whatever it is Simmons does. Political comedy—which Simmons says bores him to tears—might be more obviously anti-establishment, but his is a rebellion of form rather than content.

He commits to silliness with defiant abandon. He doesn’t care that, although he’s made fans of many a fellow comedian, “prop” is a dirty word within industry circles. And although he’s enjoying his recent shift in fortunes, he is more than happy to alienate those who scowl through his sets.

“I know people fucking passionately hate me and I know why, but I reckon it needs to be done. I don’t know if it’s gone out of fashion, but there’s not enough silly out there.”

Simmons says he almost dropped out of Edinburgh this year, confident it would do little for his career's already healthy trajectory. But with a mission statement like this, it’s clear his work is far from done.