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Comedy smash-hits come in all shapes and sizes. You’ve got your standup, your sketch – and then there are those shows in which semi-naked Australians impersonate penguins to dramatise the western literary canon. Such is Garry Starr: Classic Penguins by 43-year-old goofball Damien Warren-Smith, which delighted Edinburgh last summer, then hoovered up awards on the Australian festival circuit. After winning the prestigious Best Show gong at Melbourne’s Comedy festival (“for me that’s a Commonwealth gold,” says Warren-Smith, “and Edinburgh’s the Olympics”), this unlike-anything-else comedy set is now returning to the UK, picked up by fringe super-producer Francesca (Fleabag) Moody and expanded for bigger audiences.
The show, which animates a bookshelf full of Penguin classics in 60 minutes, is not a complete departure for its host. Yet another graduate of celebrated French clown school Ecole Philippe Gaulier, Warren-Smith’s first stunt was to showcase every theatre style in under an hour (Garry Starr Performs Everything, 2018), and his second was to bring all of Greek mythology to life in the same timeframe. It’s a simple formula, as he admits: “Choose a highbrow topic that most people know quite a lot about, then just get it wrong – which makes me stupider than everybody else.” Garry, according to his creator, isn’t a character, he’s just “the most enthusiastic but slightly less intelligent version of myself. He’s like me if I had no inhibitions.”
In Classic Penguins, that “eternal optimist and over-reacher” turns his attention towards great books. Clad in tailcoat, flippers and alarmingly little else, our lanky host performs one inexplicable stunt onstage after another – then explains them by revealing the title of the next book off his paperback pile.
“I was in a Perth bookshop two years ago,” he says, “and happened to notice those beautiful, aesthetically appealing orange and cream spines on the shelf, and the penny dropped. I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s got to be [my next show].’ I called my producer straight away. I then put together a list of over 100 books, and went through it giving them the Garry treatment. What is the one thing I know about this book already? Frankenstein builds a monster, say. And what could Garry get wrong about it?” Watching the show, the pleasure is intense as you puzzle out Garry’s doofus misinterpretation, what bizarre visual gag or literary pun is now unfolding in front of you.
But what flips the show from bookish brain-tease into raise-the-roof party-comedy is the involvement of its audience. “I never made a conscious decision to push things as far as I could [with audience participation],” says Warren-Smith, on Zoom from Oz. “But being on my own, I wanted to play with people.” Being on his own wasn’t always the plan: Warren-Smith has variously worked as an actor, and as part of the clown troupe A Plague of Idiots. His solo career began, reluctantly, when they disbanded. “So now, if I had an idea for a scene that needed two people – well, I couldn’t pay someone to be a plant. So I’d just ask audience members to help.” In Classic Penguins, spectators are duly invited to be shot, tied to the floor, to manhandle our naked host, and join him in bringing Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book to very improbable life.
That latter scene is one of Warren-Smith’s favourites, for reasons I can’t reveal without spoilers. Another is his Wind in the Willows skit, the “puerile” (his word) content of which you can probably guess. “There’s about 30% of the audience who just can’t control themselves after that.” What concerns its creator, now the show (and his career) is scaling up, is whether he can keep his percentages that high. “When I saw Ricky Gervais in a stadium, it was completely un-thrilling. If the only way to make money is live, and you have to get bigger to do it – or stay smaller and charge more – that doesn’t interest me. I’d rather continue to make work my way and not be famous or wealthy.”
I suspect there might be a middle way, for an act – and a show – whose potency certainly won’t be limited to small rooms. That would be good news for Warren-Smith, because “for 45 minutes after every show as Garry, I am just buzzing. Every single show, I have to pinch myself, because when I was an actor I never found that kind of freedom and pleasure.”
But if all else fails, Classic Penguins may have opened up other professional avenues. “On the last night in Edinburgh, this woman came up to me and said, ‘Have you read all these books? Do you read a lot? Would you be interested in being a judge for the Booker prize?’ I was like, ‘Aah, yeah, sure. Drop me an email!’ Thinking this was maybe a crazy person.” He’s since been told it was legit. “And had I not dismissed it quite so much,” he says, just a little wistfully, “maybe I could be a Booker judge by now …”
