Heart And Leung

“Who I am on TV isn't particularly sexy,” confesses Melbourne comedian and TV presenter Lawrence Leung. “I'm not a hot dude. I'm not a vampire from True Blood. I'm just me!”

So imagine Leung's shock and surprise when one day he happened upon an erotic story about himself getting it on with another well-known Australian TV character on an online forum. Who was it? He's saving that information for the show, he says, but this writer's already tracked it down with judicious use of Google and rest assured, it's steamy stuff. 

“It was pretty disturbing,” he says. “But luckily I'm a comedian. Not only do I have a thick skin but I can mine this stuff for comedy gold.”

That was the genesis of Leung's one-hour show Beginning Middle End, which has already toured around the country and is coming to Perth in May (Leung is taking a different show, Part-Time Detective Agency, to Melbourne and Sydney Comedy Festivals this year). Leung has been building his profile steadily over the decade or so he's been doing comedy; his ABC shows Choose Your Own Adventure and Unbelievable have enjoyed great success, not to mention garnered him some clearly obsessive fans.

“They say you've not really made it until you've got a stalker,” Leung laughs. “But [before the fan fiction] I have had love letters pop up in my email through my website, or sometimes at my shows people leave me little gifts and letters and things, which is kind of strange.”

Leung's shows, whether on TV or on stage, have tended to be 'quest-based': “I'll take a challenge or an adventure and explore it from lots of different angles until I run out of time or some calamity happens,” he says. One memorable example is his show from two years ago, Lawrence Leung Wants A Jetpack, where he bailed up a bunch of “backyard bogan MacGyvers” in search of a functioning jetpack. But he says that while his newest show Part-Time Detective Agency is based around him seeing whether he can cut it as a sleuth, he admits that Beginning Middle End is one of his more personal shows.

“That show is about how you see yourself being completely different to how someone else sees you. And often, audiences perceive my work completely differently from how I intended,” he says.

Leung won't long be off our TV screens. He says he's busy constantly pitching and developing projects at the ABC – none of which he can really talk about in detail – and also has a feature film project on the go, as well as recently directing a music video. That's the thing with being a comedian in this day and age. No one is limited to the stage anymore and comics are free to find their own audiences in various other media.

“Every comedian and their dog has a podcast these days, so you don't have to be held back by people deciding what your audience should be,” Leung says.

Lawrence Leung will be playing the following dates:

Friday 22 March - Perth International Comedy Festival Gala, Perth WA
Thursday 28 March to Sunday 21 April - Melbourne Comedy Festival, Swiss Club, Melbourne VIC
Wednesday 24 to Sunday 28 April - Sydney International Comedy Festival, The Factory, Sydney NSW