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Home  bfeature Good for a laugh
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Wednesday, 19 March 2008 |
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Robert Yule is nursing a strong black coffee, not that he needs the energy hit. Yule is blessed with the hyper active gene.
It’s a condition that serves his character-driven comedy routines very well.
A conversation with Yule is not unlike the energy he brings to his stage characterisation. One liners fly thick and fast, always delivered with twinkle in the eye and barely contained laughter. You get the feeling Yule’s humour is as much medicine for himself as for his audience.
As with a number of successful Midsumma Festival acts, Yule is transferring his show Beautiful People (Don’t Travel Economy) to the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. For this season the burden rests squarely on the padded shoulders of his most successful creation, Alexis Van-AirBust – the world’s richest flight attendant.
Full figured (big bottomed) Alexis has made an art out of gold digging. According to Yule, her pursuit of rich husbands with one foot in grave has propelled her around the globe. Her current love interest is 93-year-old Dimitri Smirnoff, owner of Sleazy Jets. Alexis herself is of indeterminable age; though rumour has it she was seen fleeing the 1937 Hindenburg tragedy with lit cigarette in hand.
Yule details Alexis' background with all the joy of kid playing with a new puppy.
“I like characters because they give me permission to be somebody,” he confesses. “I don’t like to put myself out there – all the characters have an element of me but at the same time they all have a life of their own.”
This detailed character study puts Yule in a class all his own as a drag performer. There are other characters in his performance armoury. The lascivious, sexual innuendo-ridden, Reverend Bertie has been a long-time party favourite but Yule also does an impeccable Julian Clary.
While a predisposition character detail may form the backbone to Yule’s improvisational humour, his performance skills were honed at boarding school where he describes himself as the “classic class clown”. Later, a career in the Australian Air Force as a flight attendant created the fodder for his routines.
Yule entered the force at the age of 19 before coming out – the notion elicits a gasp of incredulity today.
“What was I thinking,” he says, jaw slack. “Running away from coming out and joining the military, surrounded by all these men – it was a very twisted situation.”
Yule found himself pretending to be straight but camping it up among his Air Force colleagues. As he puts it, “a gay man pretending to be a straight man playing gay”.
“I wore that facade the whole time I was in the military and even now I still find it difficult if I’m in a straight company and people ask whether I have a girlfriend,” he admitted.
While his stint in the military might have been closeted, it was anything but dull. Yule was an active participant in the first Gulf War and his squadron was also responsible for shepherding then Prime Minister Bob Hawke and Treasurer Paul Keating around. He came out and exchanged the military uniform for a crisp ironed shirt of a Qantas flight attendant. Alexis Van-AirBust was born in the annual Flying Bouffant sketch comedy revues, produced and performed by flight attendants.
Yule admits his sexuality has informed his comedy but over and beyond that is a sheer delight at making people laugh.
“It’s that moment when you allow people to escape from whatever their issues are –
they’re lost in your world where you’re making them smile and I love that,” he says. “I really get a kick out of making people laugh.”
Beautiful People (Don’t Travel Economy)
Northcote Town Hall
189 High Street, Northcote
March 27 – April 13
Details: 9014 9676, www.comedyfestival.com.au
by DAREN POPE |
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