Comedian Jesse Griffin Photo: Supplied
Jesse Griffin is a performer and director perhaps best known for moonlighting as the comedic country singer Wilson Dixon.
He tells Charlotte Ryan about how busking outside a New World in the '80s set him up for a life of creativity and shares songs that have been on his mind lately.
On Wilson Dixon
The character of Wilson Dixon emerged from Griffin's improv work with The Four Noels - a comedy trio he formed with fellow Kiwis James Pratt and John Forman while living in Melbourne in the '90s.
Originally a Tom Waits-style character - quite aggressive and drunk and shouty - Dixon evolved into a laid-back, melancholy loner, Griffin says.
"A lot of the work that we'd been doing with The Four Noels had been very physical. Wilson, even though I didn't know it at the time, I think it was a reaction to that.
"To come out and literally just sit on a stool and not move and have that as the parameter for the character, to not use energy, as it were, to get the audience's attention, but to just sit there and be very quiet and make the audience come to me. Those kinds of things were, I think, a reaction to doing [The Four Noels] for quite a long time before that."
Dixon - a ladies man whose wife has left him but still lives next door - has a wistfulness about him, Griffin says.
"Country music is often about very sad things in life and about things not working out, so essentially, that's the tack I've taken with him."
After Dixon was on hiatus for a couple of years, Griffin brought him back for a 2023 show in Tauranga and was really surprised how many people came along.
"I am genuinely a huge country music fan and I think that's maybe the reason why Wilson has had longer legs than a normal parody act. It's a homage as well. I'm not trying to take the mickey when I do Wilson. I guess that's why he's lasted."
Wilson Dixon, the Country singing character of comedian Jesse Griffin Photo:
On his philosophy of comedy
"Behind every comedian is some sad, broken child, I suppose they say.
"My upbringing was amazing, but there were elements of it which maybe led me to performing because if I made people laugh at home, it could diffuse tension a bit. It felt like my role at home was to make people laugh and have fun.
"But I genuinely love performing comedy. I love to laugh and so if I can make other people laugh, then that's great."
In comedy, there's a dynamic of either punching down or punching up, Griffin says, and he always tries to do the latter.
"You want your punchline to be mocking or making fun of people that have more power than you, or have got more money. White middle-class men, you know, you can make jokes about those guys.
"I don't like to punch down. With the work that I do, I want to be punching up all the time. You want to be aspirational.
"Comedy should be coming from a place of self-awareness, self-knowledge. It should be ultimately making the world a better place. Comedy is a great thing to highlight an issue or poke fun at something that deserves to be poked fun at."
On his relationship with music
From the age of four, Griffin learned violin via the Suzuki method, picked up guitar and trumpet at high school and then drumming in his early 20s.
At 11, in a move that ended up changing his life, he and a mate decided to go busking at the Gardens New World in North Dunedin.
"We were on the front page of the [Otago Daily Times] because it was like, 'What's busking?' It was this news story. We made hundreds of dollars. It was this ridiculous thing because it was such a novelty.
"At that stage in my life, after years and years of violin lessons, I'd gone 'Oh, there's a way that ... this can be a thing that can earn you money and give you autonomy. It was totally divorced of my parents. They didn't even know we were doing [it].
"It was this really confidence-boosting experience. And from that, I went 'Oh, I can do anything'. I busked all through high school with other friends. That was like my job.
"I'm never gonna write my autobiography but it's [a big part of my] origin story. A door [opened] that day into a future that I could genuinely see coming to fruition."
On directing the hit TVNZ show Educators
This unscripted comedy series, now in its fourth season, stars Griffin's wife Jackie van Beek and grew out of a sketch she and fellow actor Jonny Brugh performed at the NZ Comedy Festival about eight years ago.
"One of the sketches was about these two inept teachers trying to instruct a classroom of students how to sit an exam. Jonny was an adult and didn't really know what was going on and Jackie's character was oversharing and just way too confident.
"We made this proof of concept in a school with some cameras, no scripts and the show got picked up. When we went to make the show we were like 'Well, let's just keep doing that'. We won't write any scripts, we will just develop these characters.
"The sense of looseness [in the show] comes from the fact that all the actors aren't waiting for a line. They're fully engaged in the scene all the time and going 'Should I say something now? What's my opinion about that?' So it feels very fresh and alive."
The cast from TVNZ's Educators Photo: supplied
When improvisation goes well it feels like magic, Griffin says.
"It's like a jazz band. When you're in the moment with each other, whatever work you're doing, and you actually get into that flow state, you're all on board. You've all got the same brain in your heads. It's an amazing creative feeling."
Jesse Griffin played:
'Pretend' by alex_g_offline
"My wife and I don't get a chance to put music on anymore when we're in the car with the kids, which is fine because you get exposed to all this amazing music. This song just keeps on popping up in one of my kids playlists'.
"It's a really interesting song because it feels like it has these echoes of lo-fi, pop from the '80s and '90s and that shoegazer, slightly domestic… singing about mundane stuff, a little bit Dunedin-soundy almost in the subject matter and stuff."
'Purple Heather' by Van Morrison
"I got into Van Morrison when I was about 10 or so. The friend actually who I went busking with, his dad was a massive music nerd and he used to make these mixtapes for my dad.
"When I was about 12 I remember my dad playing this particular Van Morrison album (Hard Nose the Highway) heaps in the house.
"When our kids were babies, Mum and Dad gave us a car when we just moved back from Australia, me and Jackie. There was one tape in the car and for literally about a year and a half we just drove that car around and listened to that one tape again and again.
"Earlier this year, my father did pass away. And the music that my dad listened to I've been listening to it quite a bit. it's been really nice to to do that.
'Good Fortune' by PJ Harvey
"It's the first song on the album (Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea) for a start and it's got this energy that just hits you.
"When it arrived I think it was like 2000 or 2001 and it had all the grungy elements of her earlier work, but this was PJ in love, basically. It just had this glittering, beautiful energy about it."
'Hit 'Em Wit Da Hee' by Missy Elliott
"I've always loved hip hop right from early days, teenage years. De La Soul and Jungle Brothers and Tribe Called Quest and Public Enemy.
"Missy Elliott has got such a great individual style - with her music, with her fashion. The fashion that she puts out there and her music videos are always really amazing. Her collaborations are always really awesome. This song is just great."
'Guitar Town' by Steve Earle
"This song was high rotation when Jackie was pregnant with June, [our] oldest daughter. We took her along. She's named after June Carter Cash, and we were living in Melbourne.
"We're big country fans. Jackie is a bigger country fan than me, I think. She took herself off to Nashville twice as a teenager and then as a young person to go and see country music.
"During the birth of our third child, we had a home birth and stalled. The midwives were like, 'Nothing's really happening.' Then we put the song on and the baby was born.
"I'll never forget that moment obviously but also the fact that that song had been part of that process of actually getting the baby out.
"We took June along to a Steve Earle concert once and we stood up the front and it was great."
'Everything Is Free' by Gillian Welch
"Her music with David Rawlings - her partner and musical partner - is just like heaven. The way their voices blend. Her songwriting is so deft. It seems simple but there's such depth to it and the economy of her words in the songs is just… she's so inspiring as a creative person.
"I've seen her live a couple of times - once here in Auckland and once in Melbourne. It was just a dream to see just her and David up on stage, two voices, two guitars, You're just mesmerised for two hours. There's nothing else going on. It's this stripped-back beautiful, beautiful experience."
