The Chaser Report - No Goldfish Were Harmed In The Making Of This Show | Grace Jarvis

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

Dom and Charles are joined by the amazing Grace Jarvis! Grace shares with Dom and Charles the ways she tried making friends while growing up and the goldfish she refused to eat. Plus, Ed Sheeran's music has landed him in court and it's surprisingly not to do with the general quality.Tickets for Grace's show This Is The Last Goldfish That I Am Going To Eat For You can be purchased here! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. I am Dom. He is Charles. Hello. And our guest today is comedian Grace Jarvis. Hey, Grace.

Hi, thanks for having me. Your show has an excellent title. This is the last goldfish that I'm going to eat for you. It's on at the Sydney Comedy Festival, 29th to the 30th of April, 9th to the 13th of May at the New Zealand Comedy Festival. and no boasting 2nd of the 13th of August at the Edinburgh Fringe. Oh, very nice. How many goldfish were harmed in the making of this show, Grace? No goldfish.

The goldfish is fictional. No one was harmed. I'm slightly disappointed by that because I saw the title and I thought that I have so many questions about this. I'm so glad we get the chance to ask them here. Well, it's called that because my dad thought that would be a good name for a comedy festival show when I was about 19 and had owned. been doing comedy eight months and I wrote it down and then that's the story my dad is very involved in my in my career because I thought it was a very savvy title I thought oh what she's

doing is she's trying to provoke the vegan oh right because you know how Lewis Spears made all those Dalai Lama jokes at the Melbourne Comedy Festival he got picketed and then he did a sellout run because, you know, it didn't matter about the quality of his show. He got all the attention. It is a good method. I do think, I did do that in a way in that, I feel like once people know your name enough, it doesn't really matter what your show is called, they're just coming to see you. Oh, yeah.

But no one knows who I am, so at least my show title and poster are, like, interesting. I mean, I was envisaging some kind of puppet master who's made you eat a succession of goldfish over the years, maybe has some sort of vendetta against sort of ornamental fish and then at some point you've just gone, I'm taking agency, I'm taking control of my own life, no more. This one, yes. This one's fine. You're going to have this one, but there's an upper limit and we've reached it. I thought it was a heroic story of sort of stepping forward and taking agency, grace. Well, it is, it is that, in that sense, it is, that is the story very much. It's about sort of all the stuff I did to try and make friends as a kid before I realized

I had autism and just like how low the bar is for being considered a, weird kid and like stuff like that and then yeah being essentially being like I'm not going to eat the goldfish anymore I'm not going to do stuff that you think makes me normal because it's not working yeah and frankly if you'd ever been told that the consuming goldfish would lead to the warm embrace of everybody in your you know primary school class or something no it's not going to work out I do recall I went to England when I was in primary school though and oh my god making friends is is impossible I mean I've never been good at it but I had to pretend to like soccer for years. Oh God, in England. Yeah. That's worse than eating a goldfish.

I think my problem is that I never pretended to like anything I didn't like. And so maybe that would have helped actually. I never thought of it as an option for some reason, which is probably half the problem. That's a genuine question. Would you rather have friends or integrity? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. Autistic people usually say integrity. Well, but isn't it that it just doesn't occur to autistic? Because my son's autistic. And you sort of go why don't you just because we were at a party yesterday and there's a whole lot of people playing you know Nintendo Switch like kids his age and we went oh you know but like you know you like you like playing Nintendo and it's like but I don't like that game and it's like

and that was the end of it and it's like why can't you just pretend that you like that game but it didn't occur to him oh I understand his logic so much but I'm wondering if that's correct in the long run because otherwise you treat yourself into knots and you end up spending hours playing a crap game that you hate like who's the winner in that scenario?

But you end up with friends. But they're not real friends if they make you play the bad game Charles. He's right. I think this makes a lot of sense. I think I'm convinced by the logic of this actually. So can I just let's cut to the end and not spoiler alert

but do you have friends now? Did you get to work out how to do that? Yes. Well, I didn't make friends my whole first year of uni, and I didn't drink, which I think was half the problem again, because all 18-year-olds want to do is get completely wasted. I was like, I have a chronic pain disorder. I'm going to dislocate an ankle. I can't get more relaxed than this.

And then I eventually was like, oh, I'm 18. I can go into bars to do comedy. And so, yeah, I made friends. You know, they were sort of my first, my only friends had ever made. and as an adult have been comedians. Brilliant. Oh my God. But they're the biggest weirdos of all.

Yeah, they're mostly all also autistic, to be honest. I think that's part of it. See, again, I admire your life choices here, Grace, because I didn't drink much either when I was 18, but that was for a much worse reason, which was that I was fairly religious and I had a Christian girlfriend who disapproved of drinking. So I spent my whole first year of uni,

able to drink, willing to drink, yet not drinking. In hindsight, It was terrible. It was an awful way to spend the year of being 18 for a totally stupid reason. And also, my year of being 19. That's another story. So again, had I gone and done comedy and made friends with comedians rather than Christians, I would have been miles better off.

You might be dead, but you might be an alcoholic by now, to be fair. It's pros and cons. And also that would have required you to be funny, Don. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's a problem. You said before nobody knows who Grace Jarvis is, Who is Grace Jarvis?

That's a very confruging question, Charles. Very confrudging question. Have you managed to answer that? What? Pardon? Have you managed to answer that? I don't know that it's, I don't know that that's supposed to be the answer to the question in my second ever show. Like, I'm not sure I figured that out until like my last one, you know.

I've got a theory about people doing, I didn't realize it was your second ever show. I've got a theory. Is it like Albert? second solo show. Is it like difficult second show? Yes, absolutely. So, and I saw this, even this year, it happens every year. People have a sort of successful first show and they go, oh, yeah, I'm really good.

And then they do the difficult second show and they get earnest or ambitious, right? Like they go, oh, I'm going to do. And I've got a friend, I don't think I will name her name because it's too bad, right? Oh, no, maybe I shoot. Sarah Kendall, right? So, it's very successful. I adore Sarah Kendall. She's part of the reason I started comedy.

Oh, right. Well, there you go. I mean, she's very good at it now. Yes. I used to watch her on the gala when I was a kid. I loved her. She's brilliant, right? And her first show, brilliant, sold out every night at the Melbourne Town Hall, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Second show, she decides to do about war. Oh, I remember the war show. I remember the war show. And it's like the most ambitious idea. Like, I am going to do a show, which isn't necessarily even fun. But it does end with the moral that war is bad, right? And she did. She's not wrong.

She's not wrong. But it sort of, it wasn't funny because, like, I mean, it sort of. Well, unfortunately, most of my shows are a little bit about war because I'm raised by veterans. Oh, wow. Oh, dear. Right. Unfortunately, whatever I try and write, I always end up with a little fucking joke about veterans or. I think the difference might be

that that's actually a connection with lived experience of war rather than a comedian coming in and going hey guys I've got this amazing insight about war it's not great it's bad news guys I condone this also bad news but also don't they make you come up with the title of the show

all the men in my life have PTSD oh my God what do you say don't they make you come up with the title though months before oh yeah that's why and so that's why I think the Willandison approach is sensible because just endless puns on your name that have nothing to do with the content of the show.

Whereas if you said... Michael Hing does that as well. Yeah. That's also his math thing. You don't have to write to... If you said it's going to be called war, then you can't go, okay, here's a bunch of observations about cafes. You know, you've got to box into a corner. Well, you could do that with Grace Jarvis.

Grace is a perfect word. Amazing Grace. Yeah. Not an original. Yeah. I have sort of not done it on purpose. No. Just in that I'm already sort of treading on.

Will Anderson's turf, what with my having chronic pain in my hips. Oh, yeah, that's... I don't want him to think I'm coming for his territory, yeah. That must be inconvenient to have a very unpleasant medical condition. That is the same as a comedian who's already done shows about it. I know, he's already covered. I used to watch him on the gala too, and he would do jokes. Ah, I can't remember the joke.

The year, I can't remember what year it was, but he had this joke about how he has a doctor, and he was like, what is your, the doctor was like, what do you take for daily pain? And he said, I take pan. Panadol osteo, and he went, oh, Panadol osteo, you can take that every day because it does fuck all. You should take that Panadol rapid. It does fuck all quickly.

And I was like a 15-year-old with chronic pain being like, this guy gets it. He does do fuck all. The Chaser Report, now with extra whispers. Do you feel like you've been boxed out of most of your identities? Because, like, Hannah Gadsby probably has the upper hand on autism now. Damn it. Will's got the chronic pain. Do you need to acquire some other sort of terrible,

oh, not terrible. I mean, wonderful difference that you can sort of trade on? Maybe you could talk about awkward interviews. No, that's mine. That's my. I've already got to lock that up. Yeah, I guess I'm more of a combo. I've got the Children of Veterans thing,

chronic pain, autism, PTSD. Like, I got a lot of elements I can pull from. And so you're, Your parents, they went to war? My dad, yeah, he was in Iraq and East Timor and Papua New Guinea, yeah. Wow. And does he not talk about it or does he talk about it? He talks about it.

It's weird. I don't know if this is like a universal dad experience, but he'll reveal his law in very short bursts. So every time something new comes up, my sister and I are like, write it down, write it down. My grandfather was like that. We haven't heard this one before. You get the very occasional little tiny burst of insight into some horrific thing that he did.

Because he got given the Distinguished Service cross my grandfather, and we don't really know why. And it was either, he always sort of was playing it down as like it was some administrative error. But presumably that's not a thing. Like presumably he did some amazing slash terrible thing that we'll never know about. And I don't want to know it. But it must be, and his whole thing is just to repress all the detail. He just never really talked about it much at all. It would be nice to get fragments occasionally, I think.

It would have been nice back. The fragments are very interesting. He, I love this story, and I've tried to tell it in stand-up before, people don't really like it. But he heard his back just before he went to his posting, and it was like in resistance to interrogation training because the Australian military is very poorly organized. It's probably about to say this after Anzic Day,

but they forgot to send him to resistance to interrogation training until like the week before he was going. So they did it at the last second. That doesn't sound ideal. No, everybody got way more traumatized in like a woolshed in regional Queensland than they did in the actual war zone. And they hurt his back and he went anyway and he couldn't run. And so he was like, this is my plan.

If we get shot down because he's a helicopter pilot, if we get shot down, guys run and I'll stay and pretend to be local is a phrase that I have always adored because my dad is a white man who speaks English. What would that be? What would pretending to be local look like? Just sitting in the sand like a Monty Python sketch? Amazing. Yeah, that would last, that wouldn't last all that long. No. I can imagine though. I mean, I'm not an expert in anything to do with the military, but I would think that at the point where your training leaves your recruits unable to run in a war zone, you've kind of fucked it up at that point, haven't you?

I reckon reconsider. Yeah, I think. Everybody was very upset. I was very little. I do feel a bit weird about telling these stories, but, you know, I was very little. But it's worth noting. I was not participating in the conversation. But it is comedically bad.

It's clearly, like, darkly bad how, that they fucked up the train to that degree. Oh, sorry. You're supposed to have resistance of interrogation training. You're going next week. Let's just squeeze a bit in. We'll do it in a woolshed. Let's tie you up in a woolshed here. And your back might not make it.

But at least you will have had the resistance of interrogation training while at the same time giving you an injury, making you unable to escape and thereby inevitably getting interrogated. Requiring you to use resistance. I think it was literally they were like, well, we can't go without ticking this box? And it's like, can you have a little bit of nuance around this situation, maybe? Well, you've trained for it. now so we may as well make sure you need it yeah yeah true i wrote an essay in uni about how um my dad

got injured and then he went and he went he got deployed and then he came back and my childhood guinea pig had both of his back legs paralyzed um so he also couldn't run and i think the purpose of a guinea pig is to teach a child about death so i think in this situation most guinea pigs would be put down but my dad was so like so like injured and just back from a war zone and like I don't know didn't want us to feel like they could put he we could put him down kind of thing so we gave him little we gave our guinea pig little physical therapy like occupational therapy and got his legs working again that's so sweet and yeah I mean at the point where he identifies with the guinea pig that's that's probably another whole separate problem but it's another

problem with the Australian army I would say yes I would say so now speaking of very metaphor Cool, though. Speaking of deeply traumatic experiences. It was a great essay. It was a great great. They can't mark you down, can they? They can't be like, oh yeah, look, that's a bare pass. It's a great, it really cross-translates those two events.

Now, look, speaking of trauma, you've been listening to Ed Shearin, and I'm fascinated to hear what your thoughts are on this. I'm not sure that I've been listening to Ed Shearin so much as the entire world is constantly hit over the head with Ed Shearin. Yes. So it's hard to avoid. But I gather you've been looking into this whole question of whether or he ripped off Marvin Gay, which is in the courts at the moment.

And I would think if you're on that jury, you would have to listen to Thinking Out Loud by Ed Shearing hundreds of times. And without the lyrics as well. The lyrics are legally irrelevant. So they just have to hear the acoustic, like just the melody of thinking out loud so many times in conjunction with Marvin Gay's Let's Get It On. It feels like another form of. of resistance to interrogation training.

That's a torturous event. Although I must say that it is the coolest thing I've ever heard about Ed Shearing that he might have stolen something from Marvin Gay. Like that's, if I was here, I'd be going, yep, I did. And so is the rest of my work. I have a percentage on everything, Marvin. Well, apparently he's done versions of thinking out loud on stage that turn into, like to let's get it on.

Like he does the medley himself. That's a sad. Right? Yeah. But also, it's not, like, I've heard both of those songs. The vibes are different. Yeah, because Ed Sheeran cannot, in any, a talent that he is used in many ways, there is no soul in the man.

Like, you cannot, he has zero percent Marvin Gay vibes. He might be all, he might, he's, he's got a soul, but it's, it's not horny. It's not horny enough. There's no, there's no, there's no sexiness in any of Ed Shearin's songs. No. No. If anything, he's asexual, if anything, playing an Ed Shearing song in the bedroom, I would think would quieten things down. Like, if you brought a date home and you wanted to not get it on with them,

you'd put on Ed Shearid, wouldn't you? Ed Shearin is what you play when you're closing down a cafe and you want people to know that you're not open anymore. That's right. We are mopping. The machine is off. Don't come in. Didn't he get sued over shape of you as well, which is his one horny song?

And clearly, like there's no way that the horniness in that song comes from Ed Shearin's own hormones. Like, that's just not a thing, sure. No, that's probably the whoever was writing it with him stealing it. What was that? What song? I don't remember, but he's had a bunch of these lawsuits now. And he's sort of saying, oh, it's really sad.

You know, all of us creatives who make hundreds of millions of dollars for other people, we're getting sued. It's terrible. Yeah, you're really in a league of your own there. So I feel, I don't know, I've never done jury service, but I imagine that would be one where you would honestly, you'd be within your rights to just say, let's get it up with, just guilty. Guilty, don't let me listen to the song anymore.

Well, I was listening to it last night because I was like, I had heard the song before, never on purpose, it just like comes into your life somehow. It's like when I was about 14, I accidentally saw Jessica Malboy like three times. None of them on purpose. She just kept showing up places I was. How? Was she stalking you in essence? No, I think she did the Tawamba Carnival of Flowers, so she was there.

And then I think she was at a scout jamboree I was at. It was weird. I just kept showing up places where Jessica Malboy was performing. You hit exactly the right level of uncool events. For Jessica Mowboy to be like, of course, we'll kind of a flower, it's Jessica Mowboy, that makes sense. She crushed it. Scout Jamboree, get her out. Say what you will about Jessica Mowboy.

She goes all in every time. But yeah, I was listening to the Ed Sheeran song, and I like, I guess I can vaguely hear a similar chord progression to let's get it on. But it's so sexless that I wouldn't even have made that comparison. Like, I can't believe the people in charge of Marvin Gay's estate made that comparison. That's true. It's very embarrassing for the Marvin Gay estate. You probably have plenty of money as it is already. To be going, yeah, we think Ed Chirin's song is like Marvin's.

I would have thought you'd be going, no, there's absolutely no resemblance. And it would be more like defamation if anyone said if there was any resemblance at all. The chord progressions sound somewhat similar to me, but there's not that many chord progressions out there. Yeah, yeah, there's not. Most songs sound a little bit like each other, unless you add like a brass section, which Marvin Gay, did so like we can imagine ed sheridan trying to get a brass section together no brass section would be able to get organized behind that man they would they would simply boycott wouldn't they would they would no one's playing saxophone on an ed sheeran song surely well grace it's been it's been

delightful meeting you and um hearing about all the massively traumatic things that we just sort of scattered over and i'm sure you unfold in in great and hilarious detail on on stage and and grace's next show graceosophy uh We'll be touring next year. What's the name of this show? I'm not going to eat. This is the last goldfish that I'm going to eat for you. And the next show is going to be called, well, whoops, here's another goldfish.

Yeah, there's a, yeah. Next year I'm writing a show about nothing. No themes, no tales, just shit I saw on the street. That's how you get commercially successful. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, that's good. That's it. Just observations of odd people on the street and pigeons.

Catch Christ at the Sydney. Comedy Festival, 29th and 30th of April, the 9th to the 13th of May at the New Zealand Comedy Fest, or second to the 13th of August at the Edinburgh Fringe, if you're, I don't know, Sarah Kendall or something listening to this. Agu is from Road and we're part of the Iconiclass Network. Thank you, Grace. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Thank you.