Wil Anderson: What Am I Going To Learn About Tonight?

Australian comedian Wil Anderson is headed back to Fringe World 2026, so he gave Lisa & Russell a call to chat all things cricket, audience participation and more. He’ll be bringing his brand-new show Whatchu Talkin’ ’Bout Wil?, a 100% improvised stand-up experience with no script, no recordings and no safety net. Every night, a completely fresh show is created exclusively for the audience in the room. Catch Wil at Fringe World from 27 Jan-15 Feb. Tickets at fringeworld.com.au

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
What you're talking about, Will. That's Will Anderson's new show
that he's bringing to Leonard's Lounge from Tuesday, January twenty
seventy Sunday, February fifteen. Tickets are available through fringeworld dot
com dot au. Could call the next show. Tickets will
sell fast and he's with a snaw, good morning.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
Will you.

Speaker 3 (00:18):
I'm always happy. I'm happy there are any suggestions for
new names at this point. I mean, we're thirty We're
thirty shows deep. I keep them all on a list.
Somebody the other I said, catching Keel. I said, oh
catching Will. Good, that's good. I write that one down.

Speaker 1 (00:34):
Okay, how quickly is this year gone? We're already talking
early January or you know, late January fringe shows.

Speaker 3 (00:43):
I mean, it's incredible. My tour of what you're talking
about Will last year. So I set out to do
these completely improvised shows every single night. I did not
know really if I could do it or not. And
I put seventy eight shows on sale. I just did
the last one last weekend, and now I'm plugging next
years too, So it does feel like I'm just doing

(01:03):
it again. But I loved it oh much. It was
the most incredible comedic experience I've ever really had in
my life, which was just the opportunity to go out
every single night with a blank page and then have
the audience audience provide the ingredients that you work with.

Speaker 1 (01:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:18):
Yeah, completely improvised, so you never know what's going to happen.
That must Is that a bit nerve wracking?

Speaker 3 (01:24):
Oh? At the start, it was completely nerve wracking. Now
it's just exciting. Now every night you're like, what am
I going to learn about tonight? What unusual thing about
the world that I was not aware of? Am I
going to discover tonight by talking to someone in the audience.
And sometimes it can be an emergency nurse telling you
what the latest patient came in with, you know, dangling

(01:45):
out of their butt, or it might be somebody literally
explaining how birdslu gets transmitted. Like we run the full
gamut in this show, and the two are not connected,
connected to each other.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
Being improv I imagine the show could evolve so much
over the course of a week. If you know some
of the same topics, if they're sort of news topics
come up, well, it's very interesting to me.

Speaker 3 (02:12):
So I have a rule. I mean I'm the only
person who's keeping count. But I figure, when you do
a bunch of shows like this, you need to develop
rules for yourself and how you approached the show. And
so what I did find was that topics did come
up again, and I thought, well, how in an improvised
show do I handle a topic coming up again? And
so I set myself the creative challenge at the start
of it that if a topic came up again, I

(02:35):
had to try and approach the topic from a different angle. So,
say it was a story about your buying coffee and
a cafe, you had to do it from the brewster's
perspective instead of your perspective or whatever it might be.
And it's just been such an incredible writing tools like
because you just start to see every story not just
from the way you saw the story, but your challenge

(02:55):
to kind of look at it from somebody else's perspective,
which has just been incredible.

Speaker 1 (03:01):
Imagine if you've been doing a show on Sunday night
after the two day test.

Speaker 2 (03:04):
I was just going to say, we know you follow footage.
You could not have been not following that as well.

Speaker 1 (03:09):
Oh my gosh, oh no, I.

Speaker 3 (03:11):
Mean, I'm a huge In fact, I have a cricket podcast,
two guys one net scored. You can find that on
the Everyone Relaxed Fade. We just did a new episode
talking all about it. And yeah, we weren't meant to
record that episode on Wednesday, but we really had to
move up to schedule when we recorded that one. I've
got to be honest with you, Yeah it was. It

(03:32):
was over clicked. I mean it had all the highlight
of a normal Test. We just needed to I've got
a new theory, which is I believe that Australia in
that position, and this is what we should bring back
to Test match cricket is the opportunity to rub your
opponent's nose in it. So I believe that Australia should
have been able to opt to keep it batting for

(03:54):
as well as they wanted to keep batting. There's a
few players in the team and need some experience in
the middle. You really the England bowlers into the ground maybe,
you know, maybe Marnus gets three hundred, really gets that
average back up again, you know, and then we get
three days of extra value for all those people who've
come to person.

Speaker 1 (04:10):
Born exactly the cricket Australia wouldn't be out of pockets.

Speaker 2 (04:14):
I know, three million dollars. Jeez, Travis, could you have
just slowed it down.

Speaker 1 (04:19):
A touch, you know, I mean everybody suffered after four
years on air. We were very sad to see in
August your ABC show question. Everything was just quietly sort
of let go.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
Isn't media world wonderful?

Speaker 1 (04:35):
Yeah? It feels like that show and its subject matters
more important now than ever though, Yeah, I.

Speaker 3 (04:41):
Mean yes, I would think so too. I mean, as
the people behind the show, we're obviously a little bit biased,
you know, assessing the various important levels of those things
in society. But I think almost we're at the point
too where that engagement in the daily news system. I mean,
you know it because you have to to do it,
like in that radio, but you can't know what is

(05:03):
true anymore. You just get up in the morning and
you can read something on a website and you just
think this could just be a deep fake. This headline
that I'm talking about might not be the headline that
I mean. There were various I think headlines of the
Sunday Times, for example, that flew around the internet on
the weekend after the cricket, and I think one of
them was the actual headline, and there were a bunch

(05:23):
of others that I had quoted back to me, going
did you see the headline that said this? And I
was like, I'm pretty sure they did not put that
on the front play.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
Actually the headlinete.

Speaker 3 (05:34):
Doug route was the bit that they got correct. It
was the next line that was changed a few times.
A lot of variations on head And because I think
that's too.

Speaker 2 (05:45):
Far put two and two together, you're work it out.

Speaker 3 (05:49):
I think you can google it yourself.

Speaker 1 (05:52):
Come yeah, all right, well, speaking of googling a fringeworld
dot com dot au is what you want to google
to get your tickets for WAT? You talking about world
in late January, half of February. You're going to be
here for a while. Come a visit.

Speaker 3 (06:05):
Thanks will talking to a society appreciate it.