Yawp Mag ISSUE 19 Getting Ready for the Comedy Festival | Page 12

SimoninKeck 'Let’s Write a Book!’ Following the success of his multiple awardwinning show ‘Nob Happy Sock’, Simon Keck is about to launch into another experimental show at this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival, with a show called ‘Let’s Write a Book!’ This will see Keck reading a number of different stories for audience members, before whittling the most popular tales into a book that can be purchased at the end of the season. He’s had help this year from director and producer Paul Horan, who has helped Keck in the role of a scipt editor, “someone who would look at my scripts and go, ‘why have you dedicated two pages to this? It means nothing’”. Horan’s advice has helped Keck to be “completely ruthless”, as he’s “never been good at culling material”. In fact, he’s already trialled one story which has been submitted to ‘LateNite Films’, which is going The director prompted Keck to ask questions he’d never thought of asking before; “the biggest moment for me in ‘Nob Happy Sock’ was when when he said I wasn’t writing a comedy for people with depression, I was writing for people who had never experienced it before. Like that was my audience, that’s who I needed to write for. And so that changed everything. How do you get the idea across when no one talks about it and how do you explain how it feels?” before, much less a romantic comedy “about a guy who falls in love with a TSA agent after she invasively searches him and he realises he’s into BDSM and kind of likes to be dominated, but he didn’t know that, he was just a regular, normal guy. And then it’s his efforts to woo her. And it all goes so badly”. As well as a director, Keck has had the help of a publicist this year, as he begins to treat his career in comedy as more of a business, than just as a hobby. He recalls a conversation with fellow comedian Nick Cody, whose advice stuck in his head; “he said, ‘I can’t go to an airline and give the lady behind the desk a good review. She accepts cash. So I need to make some coin to Keck will be reading a large assortment of comical tales that tend to fall under the umbrella of “people looking for something… people them, whatever that may