Some Class Clowns never grow old

My glasses kept shaking free of my head with each impact. This. This is what happens when Steve Grimwade, director of the Melbourne Writers Festival, denies your request to pump child-safe dosages of Valium into the air ducts during the Schools Program. The back of my chair was being gleefully kicked by tiny Clarks shoes, and the squeals of over stimulated kids gave me flashbacks to being a barrista in a café.

If you’re unsure whether you want to have children, work in a café for a month. You will give yourself a ghetto vasectomy using a butter knife and a biro after your first shift. Still, I could forgive their hubris. The source of their excitement was seeing one of their favourite authors. I can’t resent any kid loving to read. I was that kid.

So there I was, sitting at the end of a row of babbling children. Looking like a lone spike of activity in a bar graph measuring bitterness by age. I was attending a talk given by an old acquaintance from my early stand-up days in Sydney. Oliver Phommavanh, a teacher by trade, had written two kids books. The covers of both exuded the quirky Asian persona that had made him popular in the comedy rooms of Sydney. Having seen Oliver perform a bunch of times I was ready to see him start with a few self-deprecating quips designed to make a predominantly white audience feel slightly better about any underlying racist thoughts they weren’t ready to acknowledge.

Those quips were still in there, but they were buried in a tirade of chaotic rants punctuated with the word ‘woooo!’. Oliver ran about the small theatre whipping the already agitated youngsters into a state of vibrating exuberance. He didn’t just have verbal diarrhea, he had Mexican tap water verbal diarrhea. One topic frenetically slammed into the next, leaving myself and any one over the age of puberty glancing at each other in amused bewilderment. He barely even acknowledged his books, instead reveling in the howling adoration of his target audience.

Phommavanh is clearly someone who never grew out of being the class clown. Watching him pull care bears from a bag of plush toys that he’d brought along left me feeling the same way I do when I watch video clips on MTV. Old, out of touch, and with no real idea of what on earth I’m looking at.

That being said, Oliver’s insanity isn’t meant for me. It’s for the children, and they bloody loved it. Bouncing in their seats, overjoyed at the unpredictable delivery, and hopefully taking in the subtle message that your imagination is your most valuable asset. I dare say that if I was their age I would have been just as enamoured by Phommavanh’s boisterous mile-an-hour rants.