COMEDIAN AND HARD QUIZ HOST TOM GLEESON ON HOW HE CURATED THE THICK SKIN NEEDED FOR HIS SPECIAL BRAND OF COMEDY

There's an old saying in comedy: Never turn your back on the audience, they might just realise they don't have to find you funny.

But when you see the Gold Logie-winning comedian Tom Gleeson casually turn away from his howling audience and saunter to the back of the stage, hanging out there doing … well, nothing — and doing it for the longest time — it's as shocking a moment as if he had stripped naked.

Gleeson knows the rule better than anyone: He's been on stage all his adult life, having no job other than making people laugh. So, what on earth is this move about?

"I actually do it a lot and it's a complete power play," he says, in the latest episode of Creative Types.

"If you ever look away, they might get bored. So, when I show my back to the crowd, that's my way of saying, 'You are all mine.'"

It comes as no surprise, when you put together everything you know about this pathological rule-breaker, that this is what Gleeson chooses to do to his audience.

He insults them in Hard Quiz, he humiliates them in Hard Chat, and he makes them squirm in his latest stand-up show, Gear, where he walks right up to the cancel-culture line and steps over it.

He has spent the best part of a year working out the perfect sequence for a gag about owning a spare house at a time when many Australians are struggling to buy one. His kicker? Other comedians joke about share houses, he tells his audience, but that's because they're shit comedians and don't make as much money as him. That's why his jokes are about spare houses.

I spent several days with the notoriously private Gleeson in his hometown of Romsey, in regional Victoria, as well as in Melbourne and Adelaide watching him do what he has lived to do since he was at Sydney University in the 90s: storm a stage and make people laugh.

He was part of the comedy generation that included the Chaser gang ("They were all rubbish. I'm not even joking. You can ask them. They were terrible at stand-up. That's why they had to form a group," he says) and realised while he was in a university band that the bits in between the songs when he had a chance to make the audience laugh were his favourite times. From then on, he tells me: "You couldn't keep me away from a stage."

Up close he is tremendously good company: relaxed, affable and entirely comfortable in the skin of the polished professional that he has worked decades to become.

He is very funny, and he loves to talk in forensic detail about failing, succeeding and the work you have to do to become funny.

"Tom really interrogates his routines," his mate and fellow comedian Pete Helliar says.

"You can really tell the thought that he's put in to find ways to deliver a routine that no other comedian's going to deliver like this. I think his ability to interrogate and really find different doors to enter in on routines sets him apart."

The other key element of a Gleeson routine is one you may have suspected for some time: Gleeson himself is happy to confirm it: "I just give in to my evil instinct," he says cheerfully. "In general life, you suppress that part of you so that other people like you, but if you suddenly don't care if people like you or not, then you can just let that out, but for entertainment.

"I used to say to my friends when I was starting out: 'Worst-case scenario? A room full of people you've never met before in your life think you're an arsehole. I don't care.' Once you realise that, then it all becomes a little bit easier.

"I think at the beginning you pretend to not care, but you've got to bash away it a bit longer to actually not care."

That thick skin enabled him to pull off one of the greatest jokes ever played out in Australian comedy. After championing axed game show host Grant Denyer for the Gold Logie in 2018, he led his own #Gleeson4Gold campaign the following year, loudly trumpeting he wanted to win because it didn't mean anything to him. And he did.

As he told the shocked Logie Awards audience that night, clutching the statue in one hand and a glass of red in the other, he did it because he loves a joke.

"I was out of control, absolutely," Gleeson recalls.

"I knew that I wanted to say a few things. For years I've watched people who aren't the most popular person on TV winning the award, so that was my first thought. I wanted to go on and say, 'I am not the most popular person on TV.' That was my starting point. But it was a strange performance at the end of it.

"When I came off stage, the first thing I said to my manager was, 'How long was that?' and at that point, he could have said 45 minutes, and I would've gone, 'Oh shit.' But he said eight and I went, 'Eight? I can live with eight.'"

After landing a nationwide joke like that, there could have been nowhere else for Gleeson to go. Instead, he saddles up every year, writes a new show and takes that show on the road, ending up at the Adelaide Fringe and then the home of comedy, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. But even that might be about to change.

"I'm going to move to a two-year touring cycle. It gives me more time to collect ideas," he says.

And perhaps a bit more time to figure out the next way to completely own those crowds.

Watch Tom Gleeson on Creative Types with Virginia Trioli on ABC TV and ABC iview on Tuesday, May 7.