LUMEN Spring 2022 - Flipbook - Page 15
“The law firm I was working at was happy to take
me back afterwards and didn’t quibble, when I
finally left for good, about the fact that technically,
I had not worked a full ten years there. They paid
me my long service leave anyway. Good people,”
he said.
Over the years, Shaun has dominated comedy
shows on Australian Television. He currently hosts
Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell on the ABC, where
every line has been researched, prepared and
practised before it hits our screens.
He fine-tuned these writing and preparation skills
in his former career as a lawyer. His intellect is a
valuable trait for a comedian.
Some of Shaun’s jokes are so clever, they go over
most people’s heads. But his gift is being able to
include all of his audience in the laughs because
of his impressive array of facial expressions - the
deliberate pauses and eyebrow-raising, so even the
proudest intellectuals know when to laugh.
In the last ten years, Shaun has become more
interested in current affairs.
“I wasn’t that interested in politics really until
Mad as Hell started,” he said.
“I write the interviews on Mad as Hell as I wish
they were. The person you’re interviewing says
exactly what you’ve written. I think that’s my legal
training as I was taught as a lawyer that you never
ask a question that you don’t know the answer to.
“Everything we do on the show is written.
There is no ad-libbing, but there is a bit of
surprising each other in the way that we deliver
the lines.
“The humour is often intellectual, but there is
always a performance element to the show. We
make jokes about the characters in the way we
present them. We try as best we can to not be too
dry. We think okay, that’s been a bit dry… let’s
bring an octopus out of the cupboard!”
Shaun has spent most of the past twenty years
building his career and raising his family in
Melbourne but remains an Adelaidian at heart.
He misses friends and relatives but visits his
hometown frequently.
“I live in my head most of the time anyway, so
I didn’t really notice any difference between
Melbourne and Adelaide or Sydney when I go
there now and then. Or Perth. New York, Rome,
Paris – they’re all the same as Adelaide as far as
I’m concerned,” he said.
“My favourite place to go was the old Glenelg
cinema on Jetty Road, which is where my wife and
I tended to go when we were courting in our
early days. We’d see a film and then go a few doors
down to a pizza place with a tiger on the window
to eat some garlic bread. The cinema is gone now.
The Capri on Goodwood road is where I go when
I go back if anything good is on there.”
One of Shaun’s fondest university memories is
when his Law Revue team was invited to have
dinner with former Australian Prime Minister
Gough Whitlam. He remembers it as being the first
time he met someone famous.
“I was grateful to be able to thank him in person
for making the legislation around the tertiary
education allowance scheme.
“This gave people like me one hundred dollars a
fortnight to pay for living costs associated
with uni.
“Because of that scheme, a whole bunch of us were
able to go to uni. It was an opportunity I’ve always
been grateful for,” he said.
So the question remains, who is the real Shaun
Micallef? Perhaps the biggest clue can be seen in
his portrayal of the slightly awkward and unlucky
in love Warwick Munro he played in the ABC hit
series SeaChange.
For those whose mothers were not addicted to
watching SeaChange every Sunday night in the
90s, Warwick is an out-of-town lawyer who falls
head over heels for small seaside town Magistrate
Laura Gibson.
With his trademark humility, Shaun admitted he
had no idea what he was doing during the filming
of Sea Change.
“If you look very carefully at all my acting work
since, you’ll see that it’s all Warwick Munro – a
slightly out-of-his-depth lawyer pretending he
knows what he’s doing. I think that’s just me.”
ALUMNI MAGAZINE - SPRING 2022
13
