5 mins with: Reseller turned comedian Paul Warnes

What is your background in IT?

I got into IT in the late ’90s. In the dotcom boom, if you knew how to turn a computer on you could get a job in IT. I joined a company (in the UK) doing some contracting and quickly progressed to CRM systems. I worked on a package called Pivotal then spent five years travelling with Pivotal in the States, South America and around the world representing the product as a technical account manager. It was a great life. I permanently had jetlag and a hangover.

How did you get to Australia?

I applied for a job as a technical account manager here – I basically wrote the job description and surprisingly got the job in 2003.

Why did you decide to be a standup comic?

I was about to turn 40 and that’s a punctuation mark in everyone’s life. I used to do a lot of travel to South America and it was always through New York so I would always stay overnight and go to the Comedy Cellar and watch the comics and really love it. I always think to myself I would love to try it.

I realised it was either going to happen now or just be a what-if, so I decided to have a go.

When was your first time on stage?

I got hold of a club called the Laugh Garage – they have workshops so I did those and it was a life-changing experience. They took me through building the stage craft and three days before my 40th birthday we did the graduation show and I did three minutes onstage. It was exciting and almost like your first taste of a drug.

I got the bug and was a hobby comic and did a lot of work and talked a lot of bullshit but wasn’t a committed comic. I did it a couple of times a month.

When did you go professional?

My father died and I went back to the UK for the funeral and reassessed when I went back what I was doing with my life. Did I want to sleep with a BlackBerry in my hand and wake up for 5am conferences and develop code that no-one was ever going to use? I could worry about utilisation figures for a team of developers or do something that I really loved.

I scaled back my work till I was contracting two days a week. I’ve gone back to my roots and now I’m just a code monkey. Now I took it through to where I’m headlining and working as a professional comic in the clubs and the corporate sector. And I bought a portion of the Laugh Garage as well.

Is there anything funny about IT?

There’s nothing funny about CRM, it’s the dullest subject in the world. I did do a lot of presentations and sales demos, so it helped me talk to an audience confidently and so on. I was sought after by the sales team to do product demos because I was entertaining and funny. There were times when it did become more of a standup routine than a technical demo.

It’s actually quite easy to get laughs out of geeks because they don’t get outside much. All you have to do is take the piss out of the marketing dept, or “the colouring- in department” as I call them, and they’re quite happy.

Are there many potential comics in IT? You get them from lawyers, admins, quite a few accountants in the world of comedy. And quite a few IT people too. It seems that the more boring the job, the more desperate people are to escape from it and comedy is a one good way of doing it.

The prevalence of games like WoW which are prevalent in the IT world, people that have the ability to think laterally is a requirement in IT and certainly is a requirement in comedy. It’s probably not that far apart. There aren’t that many jokes in XML though, it has to be said.