LOU SANZ: NOT SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN

Fairytales were hard-core back in the day. Ever leafed through the original Grimm Brothers’ Children’s Tales? Violence, incest, you name it. Rapunzel, for one, was full of sexy references to her mother’s nocturnal escapades with the prince. Snow White’s wicked stepmother started out as her mother. Her own flesh and blood! Cue two centuries of moral outrage, literary sanitisation and the advent of Walt Disney, though, and suddenly the apogee of childrens’ literature is Harry Potter. Well, Lou Sanz has a thing or two to say about that. Fresh from a sold-out season at the Sydney Comedy Festival, the Melbourne-based screenwriter and comedian is back with her new show, Not Suitable for Children. Granted, she’s not quite up to telling these tales – including such classics as Carla the Ethnic, Annie You’ll Never Amount to Anything, If Only You Looked More Like a Man – to the under-18 set. But it’s a step forward, we say – so with that in mind, we’ve put the hard questions to the woman who could well save parents from future renditions of Goodnight Moon forever.

Did you have a happy childhood? Very much so. I remember lots of sunshine-filled afternoons of being forced by my mother to stand in the sun so the rays could bleach my inevitable moustache.

You don’t have any babies. You do, on the other hand, own a bassinet. It sounds like you’re gearing up. Um, no, not entirely. I think I’d like have them but it takes two to make a baby (based on my limited understanding of Year 10 biology) and I’m not really meeting any suitable baby-making candidates. Candidates for Contiki tours, victim prevention programs, internships; but not babies. An empty bassinet will do me just fine for now.

What do you wish your parents had taught you growing up? That people will say horrible things to you as you get older and they will get worse as their own sense of self-entitlement grows. As you can imagine I was gutted when the Rapture didn’t happen… but there’s always October.

And what did they actually teach you? To iron my clothes by putting them in the dryer, and then under the couch cushions to iron out the creases, and to never ever write anything down that means anything.

Your story Adventures of a Catholic School Girl sounds a bit racy. So does Let’s Get Wet Together, come to that. Do you ever secretly hope a member of the audience will heckle you so that you can yell something about political correctness gone mad? No, not at all. I’d like to think I’d have some snappy retort but the truth is I’d probably yell something like “Yeah, well that’s not what my mum said last night, I mean your mum… yeah, your mum, not mine that’d be… um, have you tried the chicken, I don’t eat chicken but I hear it’s very good… Oh yes, my mum said that last night to you? Well done.”

June 16-18, TAP Gallery, 278 Palmer St, Darlinghurst, $20, trybooking.com/PGK