I’ve seen Damien Power’s dick. It was Melbourne International Comedy Festival 2013 and Power had just begun his jaw-dropping conclusion about society and the media. Moments later, it became a pants-dropping conclusion, and his show was eventually nominated for the Best Newcomer award. You walked out of his show with your views challenged. And his latest show, I Can’t Believe I Cared, seems even better.
“I’m really happy with this show,” Power says. “I felt like last year I stepped away from what I think I do [well] in my comedy. I think I made a lot of choices last year and experimented a lot, and it taught me a lot. [For] this year’s show, I’ve focused on sticking with the stuff I enjoy talking about – stuff that interests me. This show’s back to what I did the first show on, which is big concepts and a strong theme.”
Power’s first show blew a lot of comedy fans away, but it was more an amalgamation of bits he’d refined from club gigs. The comedian explains that in his third show, he’s adopted a more cohesive theme.
“There’s a very strong theme from beginning to end,” Power says. “The theme is beliefs. It’s how ideology functions in society. The things we believe, our dreams and our ideas, and how that shapes how we see the world in sex, love, religion, beliefs and war – why we fight in them, why we need them, why humans have them, how they function between each other. Consumerism and how ideas are sold through products. And for the first time I’ve felt like I’ve done a show from beginning to end. Everything ties together.”
To get a taste of Damien Power, check out his Tumblr. It’s titled We All Work For A Bank, and I ask him why.
“The actual title is just to do with the global banking system and how it controls money,” he explains. “It’s able to print money that now has no value. It’s not attached to gold or silver. The way the central banking systems around the world work is basically they’re able to create money and loan it out to large corporations and military industrial endeavours and mass global infrastructure projects and reap the interest of that. Down the line, we all work for a bank. We’re all paying off banks and loans that they created out of nothing.
“Bitcoin is going to be successful and it will be destroyed, because there’s just way too much at stake in control of money in the world. There will be blood spilt before its success.”
Now, all this might sound like the ramblings of a stoner, but I assure you Power has developed concepts to a much more sophisticated level than a 600-word article allows us to explore. He is drawn to big-concept material.
“In my personal life, I read about that stuff every day. I’m no lecturer or anything, but I take an interest in politics, society, cosmology and why we’re here. Especially the bigger picture stuff, not just, ‘Oh, Tony Abbott.’
“It’s big ideas and how we function as people and why we do what we do as people. I thought, ‘How am I going to make my comedy better than it is now?’ So it drew me to making that stuff funny. If I can make these big ideas funny, that’ll be a real point of difference and give audiences something more.
“It has to be funny. It can’t have long, lecture-like bits in it. It’s always about being as funny as possible, but if people can also leave with their perspective changed, or questioning, then I think you get more money for your ticket.”
CatchI Can’t Believe I Cared, as part of Sydney Comedy Festival 2015, atEnmore TheatreThursday May 7 – Sunday May 10.
