The power of two

Daniel Burt and Aleisha McCormack have moved to centre stage.

IF THINGS pan out, Daniel Burt and Aleisha McCormack might just become the Mike Nichols and

Elaine May of Australian comedy. But first they need to work out who is who.

''Am I Nichols or May?'' says Burt.

''You can be May,'' says McCormack. ''I love Nichols and May,'' she adds.
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Nichols and May are legends of the American comedy scene, having emerged as a writing and

performing duo in the late 1950s before going on to create such classics as The Graduate

(Nichols), Heaven Can Wait (May) and The Birdcage and Primary Colours (together). Yes, they've

had spats along the way, but as far as male-female comedy pairings go, theirs is the model to

which all up-and-comers must surely aspire.

''I've always dreamed of meeting someone I have a comedy click with,'' says 28-year-old

McCormack, a sometime reporter on The Circle. In Burt, she says, she has found precisely that.

''We get along in normal life, our partners get along, we socialise a lot together, but this

is the best thing comedy-wise that's ever happened to me.''

McCormack came to comedy by accident. Though she'd always dreamt of doing something on the

stage, growing up in Hobart it seemed a futile dream. It wasn't until her partner of seven

years bailed on their marriage plans five weeks out from their wedding that she found the

impetus she needed to give it a go.

She turned what she now calls ''the gift of being dumped at the altar'' into a stand-up

routine - ''I told the story so many times to friends that it went from heartbreak to comic

tragedy'' - and entered the Raw Comedy heat in her home town. Her first performance was to a

crowd of 50, including her ex. He was appalled, but the judges weren't - she won.

The final of Raw Comedy 2007 at the Melbourne Town Hall, before 3000 people, was just her

third gig. ''I was so scared, but I got such a kick out of it,'' McCormack recalls. This time

she didn't win, but she did realise what she wanted to do with her life.

Burt, by contrast, seems to have known his calling practically from birth. At 27, he is a

veteran of the local TV comedy writing circuit, and boasts one credit no one else locally can:

for six months in 2005, he was an intern on David Letterman's show.

How did that come about? ''I saw they were looking for interns, so I applied,'' he says, as if

it were the most natural thing on earth.

In New York, he worked like a dog and lived much the same way. ''I lived for six months in the

apartment of a 69-year-old alcoholic cat lady in Chelsea,'' he says. ''I spent a lot of time

at the office.''

It was a case of being thrown in at the deep end: there were 12 comedians in the writers'

room, pumping out gags for The Late Show, and Burt tried to keep up. ''It was incredibly

difficult,'' he says. ''It instilled in me a sense of discipline that I try to maintain. It

showed me that you can't sit around waiting for inspiration, you have to flex the comedy

muscle to make it happen.''

Since then, he's been making it happen for others, writing one-liners in other people's

voices. He and McCormack met on their first day of work on The 7PM Project. At lunch he told

her that eating sausages always gave him cold sores and she was hooked. ''It felt like a first

date, but a first comedy writers' date,'' McCormack says. ''I thought, 'He's opened up about

cold sores on the first day, we're going to be friends'.''

Last December, they quit the show together, determined to try something new. ''I loved it, but

it was time for me to step up and find my own voice,'' says Burt.

The first fruit of their labours is He Said, She Said, a joint effort stand-up show that plays

this weekend only at The Butterfly Club in South Melbourne. (There's also a McCormack-penned

sitcom set in a self-storage facility in the works.)

McCormack's half of the material is personal, delving into her ''weird'' childhood and her

relationship with her mother. ''She was a psychic for a time. She would take me along to aura

-cleansing sessions and I would play with my Barbie while they said, 'Your child has an evil

black heart.' I've still got it,'' she adds triumphantly. ''They didn't cleanse it out of

me.''

Burt's material is more observational and one-linerish, though he objects to the description

of him as a ''zinger slinger''. ''I will never say anything I don't believe, I will never say

a joke for a joke's sake,'' he insists. ''Every line, I would like to think, has a miniature

philosophy behind it.''

He Says/She Says is at The Butterfly Club, South Melbourne, tonight to Saturday at 7pm.