Writer and comedian Patrick Marlborough has been entertaining, enlightening and worrying us for over ten years. Patrick is the writer of hundreds of articles and essays, always both amusing and harrowing, and they’re now performing their third Fringe show, Bad Boy Buckley which begins on the 5th of February at DADAA. I ask Patrick a few questions about the show.
Bad Boy Buckley features your famously rude dog in both the title and poster. For those who don’t know Buckley, can you explain who he is?
He is the Martin Bryant of dogs. Need I say anymore?
How much will Buckley be a part of the show? Can we expect a live appearance?
I’ve been getting this question a lot. Everyone wants Buckley to be there. Everyone wants to pet Buckley, who, despite the show’s title, they seem to believe is some sorta good boy. My response is this: no insurance company on God’s great Earth will cover this show if I let this walking talking (well, barking) embodiment of the ear scene from Chopper into the venue. It’d be like inviting Osama Bin Laden to the 9/11 memorial: no dice!
Your 2021 show On Fringe was rightfully critical of the political and economic shadiness of the Fringe World model, and maybe even seemed to bait a future blacklisting. As you have performed two Fringe shows since, do you still feel the same way now? What keeps you wanting to perform as part of Fringe?
In my past shows, I’ve called Fringe a pyramid scheme dependent on desperate 44yo clown-school drop-outs and lapsed public masturbators to prop itself up. In Killing Rove, I repeatedly stated that Fringe was sponsored by Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram (which remains true, look it up!). Fringe performers work in a sort of indentured servitude in the hopes that an embittered divorcee who runs a small theatre blog called chuckler.net will give them a 4 star review and call their show “delightful” or “trenchant” or simply “a blast.”
What keeps me coming back is a deep sickness of the soul, and what can now only be described as “fatal ineptitude.” That, and I’m chasing that chuckler.net tick of approval!
Killing Rove also seemed provocative in that it playfully attacked both Rove McManus and other celebrated Australian comedians. If you are permitted to say, did you hear any response from these people?
I still see Killing Rove as a loving tribute to the man itself, but yeah, if Paul McDermott wants to take me to court for implying that he masterminded 9/11, then I totally get it.
No one talks to and/or knows me/I am Australian comedy’s Hiroo Onoda, so I get no responses other than more successful ABC-panelist comedy friends saying “if I share your poster to my story I will lose my job, sorry.” Fair.
I did meet Rove about a month after Killing Rove’s interstate tour ended, and, upon hearing the show’s title, he (rightfully) looked at me like I was Mark David Chapman. Rove, if you are reading this: come to Bad Boy Buckley, I swear this is not an elaborate trap!
For live comedy, On Fringe and Killing Rove were hugely ambitious audio-visual shows combining performance, props, slide-shows and video (not to mention the AI co-hosts). What was it like trying to wrangle all these elements together, and can we expect the same in Bad Boy Buckley?
Absolutely nightmarish. I almost always make these shows in under a week in a dangerously manic state, doing all sortsa technical trickery that I’m doomed to look back on like “how the hell did I make that floating/talking Peter Helliar head? Did angels guide my hand?” etc. I am absolutely useless with computers and anything digital, so I see these shows which are so dependant on dodgy Chinese deepfake apps which make my phone heat up like a baked potato as, ultimately, some kinda unconscious penance for all my sins.
I promised myself the next show (this show) would be low key “normal” standup, but due to a mind that would have had me (rightfully) drowned in a creek bed by village elders 600 years ago, Bad Boy Buckley is shaping up to be my Apocalypse Now.
Please, for my own sake, I must be stopped!
Can you tell us a bit about your process in writing your comedy shows?
4-6 months of deep existential dread, then a month of intending to cancel the show and quit comedy/writing/the arts forever, then about 8 days out I wake up at 3 in the morning and scream “HECK! WHY NOT!?!” into the darkness, then spend the next week or so in a Vyvanse fuelled waking nightmare which is surely shaving entire decades off my life, to then rework a major chunk of the show 15 minutes before stepping on stage.
I wish I was lying.
What would make Bad Boy Buckley feel like a success to you?
If it ended in my arrest and a well-earned stint in Graylands.
Since returning to WA from New York in late 2019, just before the two years of pandemic drabness, how much do you think life has improved here since 2020?
You just have to look at the heart of this beautiful city: Yagan Square. There’s the whole picture, right there. A land of hope and opportunity. A land of wonders. Who does not gaze upon it and find themselves daring to live, daring to hope, daring to head-butt a Transperth guard and set the course of their otherwise unremarkable life in stone?
I think it’s beautiful. #perthisok
Your first published book, Nock Loose comes out next year. Can you tell us about it?
It’s good!
You can get tickets to Bad Boy Buckley here, running on Feb 5th and 6th at DADAA Fremantle.
Follow Patrick Marlborough’s writing and goofs on twitter and instagram. I think they are some of the only social media accounts worth following.