The Importance of Checking for Smurfs

On the immigrant experience of belonging...

With feet planted in Cyprus, Australia, the UK and now the USA, my family and I straddle oceans. If my family had a crest, it’d be a congenitally bald, thalassemic eagle in its Sunday best being tutted at by a lion and a kangaroo after being caught red-handed checking the Premier League results during the liturgical blessing at Greek Easter.

Straddling Two Worlds

It’s 1985 in Cyprus. It’s summer and it’s HOT. We’re at my Auntie Αυγή’s (Dawn) house in Larnaca. I’m eight years old and I’m meeting part of my family for the first time.

“Έχετε στρουμφάκια στην Αυστραλία?” my second cousin Μιχαλή (Michael) asks.
“Yes, we have Smurfs in Australia.” I reply in the basic Greek that I’ve soaked up over years at my Yiayia and Papou’s house. I pause briefly and hope he’s asking if we have the TV show, not actual Smurfs.

Μιχαλή is six, his brother Γεώργιος (George) is eight, as am I. They’ve never been to Australia and it’s my first time in Cyprus and we’re eager to play, we just need to find common ground.

“Yes, we have Smurfs. Yes, I love football. Oh, our football is a different shape but let's play yours. Yes, we have Mars Bars. Of course I’d love one. No, I’ve never ridden a kangaroo but if there’s more chocolate going I can spin you a yarn about the bilby I’m mates with.” 

They laugh. I laugh. We read Mickey Mouse comics. I understand about one in every three words. I don’t complain. I plough on hopefully. We play football. We eat ice cream. It’s fun.

I don’t realise it in 1985 but twenty years later when I move to the UK where I live and work as a stand-up comedian, I will again be straddling worlds, nightly. Meeting strangers, discovering common ground through laughter, bumping into problems but ploughing stoically on. This will come to define much of the rest of my life.

Wogball, Mobile Mechanics and the Anzac Spirit
Cypriot is to Greek what Australian is to English: a bastardised island dialect. “Μόλις έπαιξε μάππα για πρώτη φορά!” Michael tells a school friend we meet at the park, who genuinely cannot believe what he’s hearing. 

But it’s true. At age eight, I did play soccer for the first time. Michael calls it “μάππα” which is Cypriot slang for football. It just means “ball”. Playin’ ball! In Greek it’s ποδόσφαιρο, literally ‘football’ I’ve continued to like μάππα to this day.

At school in the 1980s and 90s some kids disparagingly call soccer ‘wogball’. The argument, if I understood it correctly, was that soccer is a sport from there and here we have our own sports. You came from there, but you’re here now and yes, pizza and souvas are good, but that’s ample integration thanks. The thought of liking both either doesn’t occur, or seems threatening in some way.

The time I felt most Australian.

It’s 2006. I’m in Stuttgart, Germany with two thousand mates and two good friends. Lined with pubs and restaurants, the central platz or square is packed tighter than a marginal seat. It’s the FIFA World Cup and thousands upon thousands of Australians and Croatians, a horde of gold hatched against red and white are here to watch their teams play the next day.

It’s a glorious day, steins of beer are flowing and soon a great chant from the Croatians emerges in their native tongue. Impenetrable and fierce, militaristic yet joyful it marches itself round the square, then builds to a towering crescendo, ending with a bone jangling roar of ‘Hrvatska!’ (It means Croatia, who knew?).

A Croatian I meet in the gentlemen’s convenience informs me that it’s a very famous football chant about the glory of Croatian football (I think most will agree, a fine subject for a football chant). 

Meanwhile back in the square, recently roughed up by a tidal wave of raw Croatian patriotism we find two thousand and two tense Aussies plus me mentally flicking through the back catalogue of renowned songs about the glory of Australian football and coming up emptier than a COVID affected MCG on Grand Final day.

But just when all seems lost, from the back of Beyond (a gastropub on the square’s southeastern corner) one man’s patriotic cooee reverberates then resounds. He speaks one word, three, five. By the time he speaks his sixth, he is no longer a lone trumpeter, but one mere snowflake in an audible, accelerating, avalanche of Australiana. Which words roused such force so fast?

“My Dad picks the fruit,
that goes to Cottees.
To make the cordial.
That I like best!”

They say sport is modern war. I’m forty-three, I’ll probably never be called up to fight. But that day in Germany, standing alongside my brethren, strangers all, belting out a song encouraging all in Sunbury to purchase sugar water. That was my ANZAC moment. 

Like the ill-fated landing at Gallipoli, they had the high ground, we were outgunned, plus the whole shebang was a dumb English idea in the first place. But we showed up, we stood up and we charged. Wielding nothing more than My Dad Picks the Fruit, Happy Little Vegemites and the ad for Lube Mobile.

If I told you how many of us remembered the Lube Mobile phone number perfectly fifteen years on, you wouldn’t believe me. The everyday banality of our conformity was at once passionate, unifying and terrifying. You weren’t there. You didn’t see us all singing Lube Mobile in a square in Germany to a group of genuinely perplexed people. You wouldn’t understand.

Between Two Gigs

In 2004 I abandon my legal career to move to the UK and pursue stand-up comedy. My grandparents are heartbroken but to be fair, if they didn’t want their grandson to move halfway across the world to pursue a dream, they should have set a better example.

I start by gigging in London. London crowds are cosmopolitan: a melting pot of tourists and Londoners (by which I mean people from every country on Earth. Cosmopolitan. Polis cosmos. People from many places. It’s Greek.) It’s a joy.

A few months later I start getting gigs ‘out of town’. And shockingly, I start struggling. I haven’t changed, so what has? The audiences have. Toto, I don’t think we’re in London anymore. I’m thirty miles away, but it’s a different world. Comedy is communication. If the audience can’t relate to or don’t care about what you’re saying, they won’t get it. That’s why it’s always good to check if they have Smurfs there.

For fifteen years, between five and seven days a week I migrate almost daily, criss-crossing the country. The Glee Club in Birmingham, The King’s Lynn Corn Exchange, a converted barn on a farm in Hailsham. A converted bus in lots of places (it’s a bus) All the while, I’m integrating. I’m learning.

People say you can tell where Australians are from by their accent, but I can’t. In Britain you can. We’d drive half an hour east of London and “Allo!”, where did all the aitches go? Drive to Newcastle and three quarters of the way there everyone starts speaking using glottal stops, or as they say, “glo-al stops” All because before this was one world it was two, then four, eight and so on.

The stage is its own world too. Comedians who couldn’t speak to one of them after the show for thirty seconds can have three hundred strangers eating out of their hand for an hour. Why? Because stand up isn’t life. It’s a different world. It has its own rules.

Each gig is different, but the same. Getting a laugh quickly is always a good idea: it sets an audience’s mind at ease and no one wants to watch you die (that’s the same everywhere). Knowing something about the place you’re in, good. Mistaking them for the town down the road, bad. In short, know who you are. Know who they are.

Between War and Peace

Eventually I begin performing in Europe. And, twenty-five years after I play ‘μάππα’ there as a child, I perform in Cyprus. Irony of ironies, for the British Army.

When it granted Cyprus independence in 1960, the British snipped some choice bits off as military bases. It seems to be my fate whether in Cyprus or Australia, no matter where I look: the ever-handsy British, taking liberties.

During the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Ministry of Defence noticed that many soldiers returning home from their six month tours of duty were being involved in violent encounters soon after returning. They were, quite understandably, still keyed up. Let’s call it the latest manifestation of shell-shock.

To remedy this, troops returning to Britain began stopping off for 48 hours of ‘Decompression’ in Cyprus: a band, comedians and barbecues amongst other things. Pleasingly, it works. But performing, again I find myself straddling two worlds; those of war, and peace, bridging yet worlds within those worlds.

We fly out for a week of gigs. Who we perform to is determined by who arrives that day. Some days it’s 350 infantry, some days air-force, navy, doctors, engineers. The list is endless, and they’re all different in knowledge, number, and group dynamics.

Before each gig, the call goes out for anyone who has “dirt”, funny stories from their tour to inform the MC (me) Then I’d razz whoever was involved.

After one show an officer storms backstage and blows his gasket at me for revealing an indiscretion some of his soldiers had revealed to me. After a quick mediation, I get to walk away. Here on the frontier town between war and peace he has no authority over me.

A group of soldiers gleefully mob me afterwards. It strikes me that I have become an expert straddler. There is no version of ‘normal’ life in which I encounter these men and have them thanking me like this. They tell me it’s the funniest thing they’ve seen in six months. It’s not a high bar. But of course it was, in one comment I’d done the one thing they couldn’t. Inverted the hierarchy.

Often at the nexus of two worlds, what’s important is who gets to tell the story. An officer cheats on his wife whilst on tour in Afghanistan. It’s almost certainly true, but can I say it? Must I bend to you, or must you bend to me? Is it Wogball or are they the Socceroos? When does the change occur? 

Between two pages.

Stories ground our shared reality and so, who gets to tell them is important. Around 2018 after fifteen years and five thousand gigs in fifty countries, I realise that I’m miserable, because I am untethered. I know a little about a lot, I’ve been almost everywhere but I belong nowhere. I decide to move home to Melbourne. 

After some transitional pains, now nearer to my family, my oldest friends and the places and things I grew up near, I feel more connected, happier. Far from being frivolous, each of the worlds I’ve visited reflects facets of my own, the sliver of their there lends depth and resonance to my here. I see Australia with new eyes.

After being locked in my house for the better part of a year, I decide to give up going places to speak on stage and instead, specialise in the written word. Words: Structured squiggles indecipherable to the untrained. But to those who know, a nexus between two minds, up to one of whom can be dead. A less disposable medium and a more appropriate tool for an older, wiser version of myself than the one who struggled the first time he left London. 

Each of us is born alone and die alone. But along the way, we share our stories, federating our far flung islands into communities and archipelagos. Through travel I have learned the wisdom of the parable of the good Samaritan.

If you meet a stranger on the side of the road, don’t just walk past. Stop, share your stories, play their football. Bridge your worlds.

Then call 13 13 32 and wait for Lube Mobile to come to you.

Yianni Agisilaou - 16 September, 2021.
Republished 13 August, 2022.