GLENN WOOL Happily Homeless

GLENN WOOL

Happily Homeless

Globe-trotting, hard-living, rock‘n’roll stand-up Glenn Wool brings his show No Land’s Man to the Jack High Comedy Club as part of the Perth International Comedy Festival from May 16-19. Bookings through BOCS.
Since last toasting Australian audiences with his unadulterated comic tipple as part of the Sydney Comedy Festival in 2010, Canadian comic Glenn Wool has become a man of no fixed address – conquering the world one country at a time, dispensing his own brand of caustic wit and wisdom along the way.
    “I’ve used the term ‘technically homeless’ before, but I’d hate for anyone to get the wrong idea – I’m homeless by choice,” Wool begins. “At the moment I split my time between North America, Australasia and Europe, so to have a home would be to own a place I was technically not living in which would be pretty pointless. I’m lucky in that most of the festivals I go to will put me and my girlfriend up in a hotel room for a whole month or so, so I’m not couch surfing or sleeping on the streets or anything like that.”
    Although Wool says he detests the long-haul flights that come hand-in-hand with intense bouts of globe-trotting (“I fly a lot and I don’t fly first class,” he notes with a dry laugh), being footloose and carefree has helped him keep his comic routines fresh.
    “Travelling allows me to do my job better. If you stay in one place as a comic it’s really easy to stagnate – you end up making the same jokes about the same places and people and it gets really old,” he explains.
    Wool also prides himself on his ability to succeed with any crowd, any time, anywhere.
    “Funny is funny across the board. I do write political comedy but only about world politics. That way, everyone can get it,” he explains. “There are subtleties here and there but I really don’t change the routine too much. I find there are some audiences who really want you to acknowledge where you are, but it’s such a cheap joke. I’ve found that if there’s one part one audience doesn’t find very funny, there’s usually always another part that they find more funny than another audience. So I don’t really have to edit what I’m going to say, I just have to work out how I’m going to stack it.”
    It doesn’t always go well though, as Wool recently experienced after receiving a particularly vitriolic review of a Sydney show: “Generally I won’t read reviews but somebody told me about [the negative review] when I was drunk. I wouldn’t have been so offended if it weren’t for the fact that it was so badly done – all that she had written was what the jokes were about and how hot it was in the room. I was like ‘you’re a professional?’ – it was the perfect review for anyone who didn’t have eyes or ears,” he says.
    “Naturally, in my drunken state, I looked her up and found out she was a failed author. I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt – maybe this was just one really badly written review and everything else she’d done was brilliant – so I did a Google search to see if there were any reviews of her book and there was one search result which said ‘excellent’ so I clicked that and it was actually a link to this person on Amazon who was trying to sell their copy of her book and it was referring to the condition of the book. It just said ‘Price: $2.00; Condition: Excellent. I didn’t feel so bad after that.”
    
_JENNIFER PETERSON-WARD