G’day, Tom. Your wit has been described as “lethal”. How many people have you killed with your wit, and what did their autopsies say?
I dunno. I might have killed people... I know that The Goodies actually pride themselves on giving someone a heart attack with one of their episodes. I haven’t achieved that honour. I wouldn’t mind if I did; if someone died laughing that would be pretty good. But I have had someone in an audience break their arm, which isn’t bad.

You entertained our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it was so much fun you wrote a book about it.
It was a big adventure, obviously. We did shows in Baghdad, Tarin Kowt and Kandahar. We also did a couple of places I’m not actually allowed to mention, as we were officially not even in that country when we did them. Ahem...

So, countries you’re not allowed to say the name of?
Yeah, because they’ve got bases in some hostile places, and they don’t like people knowing they’ve got Coalition troops there.

So Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey…
I can’t say. I was actually officially nowhere. If you’d tried to look for me, or if ASIO had come looking for me… actually, they would have been able to find me, to be fair — they probably organised it. Diplomatically speaking, I was nowhere. I had a diplomatic passport, too. It was odd: you just turn up to Sydney International Terminal, go through duty free, and there’s a plane there, full of people who look really fit, in plain clothes, and you land at Diego Garcia in the middle of the Indian Ocean, get on another plane and fly off to, in my case, Kuwait.

Was your wife concerned for your safety? We’re sure the protection was adequate, but even from a helicopter, you’re clearly not a Baghdad local…
I was a little concerned, but I figured I wasn’t a high priority. That’s the benefit of not being too famous — no-one’s going to get too many YouTube hits from cutting my head off if they caught me.

Would you have cracked an appropriate gag if you’d had a YouTube beheading?
Ha ha! God, that’s pretty bleak. It would take amazing fortitude as a comedian at the last minute to just go, “Thank you, good night!”

Sounds like the worst and last episode of Thank God You’re Here ever...
It would be the blackest joke of all time. You’d have to be keen on stand-up, if you just had to leave this world with a smile and a wave... 

... and a slight squelching sound. You’ve been on The 7pm Project, Good News Week, Thank God You’re Here, etc. Is there any chance someone’s turned on a TV lately and you haven’t been on it?
Well, I’ve never been on Spicks and Specks. People remind me of that all the time. “Why haven’t you been on Spicks and Specks?” I don’t know — I don’t know how they book it. I even used to be in a band, you’d think that would qualify me! I mean, I play music but I’m not particularly good at it — that’s why I’m doing comedy. But still... Maybe I’m seen as being too commercial these days, and I can’t get back to the ABC? Then again, The Chaser had a radio show on Triple M, and that didn’t worry anyone — they went back.

Yeah, but no-one listened to it.
Maybe that’s it. No-one knew it existed. But the ABC lets people back. I’d like to go on the ABC just to get some of my tax back. Eat all the food in the green room and drink all the booze just to get something back against my bloody BAS form.

You’re one of a select group of comics to get a Piece of Wood (the comics’ choice award). Was it an honour getting wood?
It’s funny, because the award was set up as a bit of a joke. Greg Fleet set it up as a sort of thing that said, “If you’re going to give away awards, I will too!” So he gave it to an act he liked, and that act gave it to another two, and then those two passed it on… It’s silly to take it seriously, but it’s nice to think you’re good.

You’ve done corporate gigs for the Taxation Institute of Australia. Give us one of your best negative-gearing gags.
When I first started doing them, corporate gigs were really difficult. I would have been about 23 or 24, and I’d walk in wearing an ill-fitting Roger David suit, and I’d be looking at all these executives looking at me like, “as if this guy’s going to be funny”. But the tables have turned now. People invite me and they know what to expect. And after going to the Middle East, it fits in. Over there, I learned as a performer not to be scared of anything — I figured that I was performing to people who could actually die in their workplace, and I don’t think they’re going to be offended by a little joke that I make. So I’d just go in really, really hard. There was one gig where the commander said to me, “You can say anything you want, but you can’t say the c-word.” So I walk onstage and go, “The commander said I can say anything I want, as long as I don’t say c**t. Which I have. What’s he going to do — send me back to Australia so I can’t hang out in this shit-hole?” And they loved it, obviously, because they want to go back home, too. So going back to corporate gigs after that was easy. I take great pride in telling them that I’ve already been paid and I don’t care what they think.

You’re from Gunnedah, the hometown of Dorothea Mackellar, two supermodels and three NRL players. What is it about the joint that makes you either want to tell jokes, write poetry, strut catwalks or spend your life clouting people?
Really? There was nothing going on in Gunnedah when I was out there. Nothing but cattle and wheat. That was exciting. Actually, there was one point where Tamworth and Gunnedah had a meeting because they wanted to get more tourism. And so they said, “Alright, we’ve got an agricultural equipment field day, and we’ve got a country music festival — who wants what?” And so the people of Gunnedah wisely said, “We’ll have the agricultural equipment fair. No-one likes country music!” That worked out well.

Are you any relation to the cock rocker Dave Gleeson from The Screaming Jets?
Yeah, I interviewed him when I was working at Triple M. He said that his dad is obsessed with genealogy, and my dad is, too. I asked him whether he went to the Gleeson reunion back in ’94. He said, “No, but my dad went!” There’s also someone called Rachel Gleeson, whose last name is now Bana, ’cos she’s married to Eric Bana. So if we ever meet, I’ll say, “Eric, we’re related!” 

Do you enjoy watching a comic dying onstage?
I love it. A lot of comics feel the same. If you perform enough, you get a bit desensitised. Provided it’s a gig that doesn’t really matter, there’s nothing better than watching someone die. Seeing a friend put the crowd off-side and not be able to get them back in a late-night club is one of my true joys in life.

What’s the protocol in that situation — do you point out they died, or just say “Good job!”?
Usually when someone stinks it up and comes back into the green room, nobody is talking, and when they walk in, no-one really talks to them. It’s not on purpose, it’s just what usually happens. If someone does talk, they’ll look at the person who came offstage and say, “How did that feel?” — which is code for: “It mustn’t have felt very good.” It’s a confusing science, because some people are deluded, and they walk off saying, “Great crowd!” You’re like, “Really? We must be in different rooms.”

Do you find it easier being a ranga now that our PM is one as well?
I’m in two minds. I did a show in 2002 called Ginger Ninja where I collected red-head nicknames, of which “ranga” was one. Back then, no-one had really heard it. It’s bittersweet for me because, at that time, talking about having red hair and fair skin was a bit unusual. Whereas now, people come up to me in the street and say “Ranga Power!” while holding up their fist and saluting. I feel proud for started something that’s gone mainstream, but I’m also ashamed, because being quoted by the Prime Minister is a bit daggy, y’know? The other thing is, people have taken their eye off the ball a bit with Julia Gillard — people have forgotten that she wears jeans on a Sunday, comes from Altona and has a boyfriend who is a hairdresser — we’ve got our first bogan PM, that’s the truth of it. The red hair is a distraction — you don’t realise she’s shacked up with her bloody bogan hairdresser boyfriend in Canberra!

Tom Gleeson's new DVD Get It Into Ya! is out now.

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