The Chaser Report - ARVO: What not to call Anthony Locascio

Episode Date: March 2, 2022

Comedian Anthony Locascio joins Dom and Zander for an Arvo Chat! Anthony discusses the backstory of his new comedy show "Don't Call Me A Wog! An Ethnic Comedy Story" and his complex relationship with racial stereotypes in comedy. Anthony talks about exactly what he doesn't want to be called, and makes a plea for people to actually bother even attempting his last name. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to an afternoon edition of The Chaser Report. Zanda Shavathevan, Dom, and Dom night with you. Hello, Zanda. Hello, Dom. How are you going in this very rainy day? It's incredibly wet. That's why I didn't come to the office.

And our guest this afternoon, another one of the comedians who's performing around the country in the next little while. Anthony LaCasio, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Dom. Thank you for having me. Great to have you here. Now, look, you're your show. there's a request in the title of your show talk us through it yeah i'm sick of it frankly i've been the people have been people have been shouting it to me for way too long so the show is called

don't call me a wog which um it's uh it's kind of uh i guess dichotomous in its uh in its aim because on one hand i don't want to be called that word and i don't really want to be i don't really want to be associated with that kind of I guess traditional humor but at the same time I would love for my people to come and buy tickets to my show and if I can give them any indication that that they should come watch because we have a shared ethnicity I will so that that's encompassed in the title and that's really what the show is about it's it's about me feeling super comfortable, super uncomfortable, super shameful, super prideful, super shameful

all throughout my life about my Italian and Great Groutes. So you want to have your Panetona and eat it, in other words. You want to get the very loyal audience that I know support your shows already and yet not fall into that category. Exactly, exactly right. I want to, yeah,

have my panatona and eat it too. Is it like there's the two wolves inside of you thing, you know, the one that wants to make money and the other one that wants to be true to yourself? 100%, man, 100%. And that's kind of the hidden aim for this show. I want to trick everybody into thinking that they're seeing what quote-unquote wog or ethnic stereotype comedy

has been in this country for the last 30 years. And then once I've got their money and their bums in seats, oh, this is something a little bit different, which I'm sure they'll still like. I've got to say, because it has been an absolute comedy juggernaut. I mean, full credit to Nick Geinopoulos and the whole team in Merrickusus. I grew up when Acropolis Now is one of the biggest shows on TV. And the number of gigs at the end more that just sold out over and over and over again for all those shows.

I mean, there's a lot of money there. So you're threading the needle a little bit on this one. I'm trying to. And you're absolutely right. And I'm certainly not intending to disparage. I mean, these people are all of my influences. I loved watching them when I was growing up. And I reference and mention a lot of them within the show because especially with Acropolis now, George Caponairus has been basically a mentor to me. I got to do shows with them, with those guys many times over the years.

I'm just aiming to show how I'm a point of difference. Yeah, right. When you started doing comedy, did you feel like you had to make content that was a certain way or in a certain style? Well, no, I didn't want to be, I never wanted to be pigeonholed. I never wanted to be known as the ethnic, the Italian, the Greek, the ethnic, comedian. But, you know, you're starting out, you're just trying to develop material that works to any degree and rightly or wrongly material about ethnicity is relatively easy to get to work

because it's something that people resonate with. And so I found myself inevitably doing a few jokes about being Italian and Greek and the contrast between those two cultures, et cetera. And as a result of that, I got labeled as ethnic comedian. And I got sent on the Wogs show tours. And I found myself either really wanting to embellish that side of my material or completely, just hating it. And that

dichotomy is what I've actually experienced as a larger thing in my life. So this show is two stories running parallel to each other. It's the story of my upbringing. When I was a kid, my parents are Greek and Italian, but they

married each other because they were not keen to just sort of stick to the herd. And we were a really Aussie family growing up. We were really, other than having lunch at my grandparents' house and having friends that were of similar backgrounds, we weren't really super duper ethnic. But then my parents got divorced,

and they were sort of both struggling for identity in the post-divorce time. And so they both really dived into their ethnicities a lot. And all of a sudden, we went from not being very ethnic to like the most ethnic people in the world. I'm a teenager going to Sydney grammar school, as Domwell knows, is not the most ethnically.

It's very diverse, but there's a lot of white people there. I'm sitting there as the Greekist kid in the entire playground and being made to feel so as well. So my life, I felt like has been a role. coaster of pride and shame in my cultural background. And then when I started comedy, I felt that that was the way I was treated and the way I saw myself in doing comedy was also a

metaphor for that. So it's two very similar stories that I'm telling across the show that almost converge at the end to the same conclusion. I just want to be clear. I was not one of the people in the playground making Anthony feel different or excluded. I just went to the same school a long time before. He was. We weren't even in the same year. We weren't even friends. We just come back to the school just come back to the school just to scream at me. Yeah, there's 30-year-old guys, they're just bullying Anthony.

Through the fence, just screaming me. I never would. But I guess it is an interesting position to be in having both of those backgrounds because both Greek and Italian people do get that slur. But of course, as you are living proof of, it's very different cultures. And so kind of bizarre that it all gets lumped in together. whereas in your case, I imagine the contrasts are pretty steep. Yeah, absolutely, and I'm the person to be able to say that.

I have a part of the show where I complain about the kids at my school also thinking that I was Lebanese. So that's an even bigger umbrella for the term Wogg. The kids had no idea where I was from or what I was doing. they just knew that I was I was something I was something ethnic I was something oily

did you find that like people would make a big deal out of your last name through school and stuff because my last name is Chavaniv right and it's got a lot of Zs and Ws in there

and the teachers would always make like a performance out of trying to get my last name right every time they said it oh big time big time and I must admit in your presence

I feel a little ashamed because my surname is a lot easy to pronounce than yours but in most circumstances it's not But nobody growing up ever really got it right. I kind of just got used to not correcting people. The best I got was I was in detention in year seven.

And the teacher pronounced my surname as Anthony. Something starting with Elle, I'm not even going to try this. Oh. Yeah. Yeah, I used to know in high school because there was a couple of Alexander's in my grade. But I would just hear like the Alexander and just the stutter afterwards was like, yeah, that's me. You don't have to, you don't have to attempt this anymore. I'm Alexander. Pause.

The Chaser report. Less news. Less often. Yeah, it's funny because I went to the same school as Anthony with a gentleman by the name of Chas Lichdello. And his surname caused enormous confusion. And I really, the first time I ever met Chaz was in roll call in year seven, day one.

And his attempt in every single class was to say his surname, his name and his surname together as quickly as possible. to confuse the teacher. And so the first thing I heard him do was a joke over and over again in class. So I thought, well, this is the class character, clearly. But yeah, no one could pronounce his surname.

It's not like it's that difficult if you hear it once. Are we not using our ears? Or do we just not care? Are we just the asshole here, the people who don't make an effort with surnames? The thing is with Italian surnames is that phonetically, they look relatively easy. But the way the English alphabet

or the Italian or English alphabet is set up, is that the letters together come out with different outcomes. So you see, you see Locasio, you look at it and you think, oh, that seems relatively easy because it is so phonetic. You jump in and then you get halfway and you realize, oh, oh, what do I do here? And I'm sure Lichadella is exactly the same thing. I got your surname wrong in trying to work out of around the stuff. thing.

Zander's her name I've gotten wrong previously. But you learn. Can't you ask and you remember and you listen? We have to deal with everyone's surnames, right? Like, and first names. It's just, probably that's just a minimum level of respect, right? But apparently not.

No. And I really have gotten used to just not really caring how people say it. As long as you've made an attempt, that's fine with me. Obviously, this show encompasses a lot of what you've been dealing with throughout your life was it you know there's been two years of of lockdown and shows not really going ahead was it was in an emotional process trying to write it over that time or did it come to you relatively quickly yes yes and no this is a very this is a compared to the last hour

that i the last hour it was extremely personal was about a breakup and and some stuff like that uh mental health issues this one's so much lighter compared to that for an audience but i was so much more angry writing this one but i just had one one singular focus i was i was sick and died of going to gigs where there'd be i did a gig recently at a at a shisha bar and it was in western sydney and the vast majority of the audience of lebanese uh and i remember arriving and one of the other comedians uh said oh you know you're going to kill here this is your demographic And I remember thinking, what makes it my demographic, the country that these people come from is not even in the same continent as the country that my grandparents have come from. I don't understand why.

And then that's a real example of how I've felt in my entire time doing comedy. And it's led to frustration. I'm not going to pretend like I've hated doing shows to 800 people when I get to team up with the Wog comedians. but I'm not necessarily doing the same things as they are. So, yeah, I realize that I'm trying, as we've said from the start, I'm trying to have my panitone and eating it too. I'm complaining about being pigeonholed, but I'm also not minding the perks that come with it.

And that confusion, that inner turmoil, that juxtaposition is kind of what this shows about. And in putting it together, do you kind of deconstruct the nature of ethnic human? Because it's a really interesting area, isn't it? Like just the actual approach to humor and how it works. And even the question of who is able to play in that space and how they do it, I think it's just a really interesting area of comedy intellectually. Is that sort of what you're getting into? Or is it more the lived experience of growing up in Australia with this background or these backgrounds?

So I've really felt in my entire time developing my own material that stereotype humor is not what I want to do because I feel like especially when it comes to ethnic stereotypes, you're discounting how unique and personal a person's relationship with their ethnicity is. If you just say, oh, well, we all came from this rock in the Mediterranean, therefore we must have had all the same experiences. I don't buy that and I don't like that. So I want this show to be relatively unrelatable, if that, if that, if that, uh, rings any kind of truth. I want people to come and say,

oh, I've also had weird experiences that have only occurred to me because of my ethnicity, because those are the stories that I'm telling. The conclusion is that, so towards the end, I talk about a conversation that I had with my very good friend and former podcast guest of yours, Harry June.

Harry and I started comedy together, we got kind of simultaneously very sick of being labeled as a wog comedian or an Asian comedian and we made a pact for a little while to not do any material that had anything to do with our ethnicity both in performance and in writing and for that period we were just like everybody else and we hated it and so we have tried to find a way to blend our cultural upbrings with the people that we are now to make something completely unique for ourselves.

And that's ultimately what I want my work to be. That's what I want this show to be. And that's the message that I want people to take away from this. The other thing is that I'm doing it at the Adelaide Fringe Festival, which is in two weeks, my show starts. I don't want to be disrespectful to anybody, but it's a fringe festival. You know, it's an opportunity for me to mold and learn the show and make changes as I go. I think people buying tickets to come and see me will give me the benefit of the doubt.

And I know that I've put so much effort into the writing and the production of this, that at the very least, even if people don't laugh at every single one of the jokes, they will at least appreciate that a lot of work has gone into this. I think if the Adelaide audience don't know by now that they're the trial venue for people to work on their Melbourne show. That's a bit of a shock. So that's the 14th to the 19th. You're in Adelaide. then you head to Melbourne

from the 10th to the 24th of April so to gigs there and then you're coming to Sydney I am coming to Sydney before that I'm going to be in Perth for the Perth Comedy Festival I've got two shows on the 6th and the 7th of May and then a week later

I will be doing one night only at the Sydney Comedy Festival at the Factory Theatre on May 13th Factory Theatre one show only in Sydney I'm trying to I'm trying to do a one big one. Very nice.

So you're going on a proper national tour? Yeah, yeah. I hope so. You know, you might have a couple of shows in Melbourne or Adelaide that might have, you know, 15 people in it and it doesn't feel necessarily like the most national tour-y kind of thing. But yes, you're right, Zanda. Yeah, and I'm glad because I've been trying to do this for a couple of years now.

Yeah, it's so exciting that it's all back, and people are touring again, comedy festivals are coming again, and let's hope nothing else messes with this, huh? Yeah, yeah, there's no, no world wars on the horizon to scare us, nothing, nothing like that. Agu's from our microphones, part of the ACAST, Creator Network, and we'll catch you tomorrow morning. Thank you.