Jenny quips for an old age fund

12:00am Sunday 11th May 2008

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SHE has ditched her grumpy sidekicks and is striking out alone once again in a bid to secure a retirement fund.

Comedienne Jenny Eclair is heading for the Palace Theatre tonight (Weds) and despite her moaning persona she couldn't be happier.

"I love the Palace," she beams, " it is great when you are performing on your todd as it has a much more intimate feel. Although it did used to have a peculiar smell years ago but I think they have cleared that up now."

Forthright, feisty and of course funny, this is typical Jenny, and there is much more where that came from .

Jenny is on the second leg of her first solo stand-up tour in four years.

"Its the same tour back by popular demand,"she laughs, " my demand that is!"

After time spent co-writing and performing in the successful Grumpy Old Women Live tour Jenny could no longer resist the call of the stand-up stage.

In autumn last year she set off on a major nationwide jaunt entitled "Because I Forgot To Get A Pension" tour.

"When it goes well, there is nothing to match the buzz of live comedy," she beams adding with characteristic wryness, "obviously I won't be standing up all the time - I'll need to sit down now and again to stop my ankles swelling!"

She believes the success of her comedy comes as it strikes a chord fans.

"Audiences like to see a mirror held up to themselves in the theatre," observes Jenny. "They find it reassuring that everyone else is in as big a mess as they are.

"They love to see someone on stage owning up to being even more hopeless, paranoid, worried and bored than they are."

"I feel I have created a rapport with my audiences because they like to see their own fallibility reflected in me.

"Grumpy Old Women has helped a great deal in that respect. It's made me into the woman next door. It's much easier being an older woman in comedy. By contrast, whenever they hear a young ingenue wittering on, they just think, oh, shut up!'."

Jenny, became the first solo woman ever to win the coveted Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Festival in 1995.

"Before that I spent 13 years slogging my guts out," she recalls.

A trained actress she first rose to fame thanks to her punk poetry performances and then her comedy.

"I wore them down in the end," she laughs, " I think they thought I'd go away if they gave me an award. Actually I am still slightly furious that my acting career is not as fully developed at my age as it should be!"

Jenny, now 48 also is the mother to daughter Phoebe, 19, and reveals she will be discussing the agonies of being the mother of a teenage daughter.

"The mother-daughter relationship has replaced the man-woman relationship as my major concern," observes the stand-up, "I'm doing quite a lot of material about the empty-nest syndrome and the natural snooping gene of the female. That is at its strongest when you're the mother of a teenage daughter!

The comic, who has built up a devoted live following over the years, is quick to reassure us, though, that she will not be entirely neglecting her best-loved topic: the differences between men and women.

"I'll be discussing how women are ruled by their hormones and men are ruled by their bowels," she says.

"I'll blow the whistle on the fact that the biggest passion-killer in the world is the en-suite bathroom - for obvious reasons!

Will men feel left out of the show, then?

"Not at all," Jenny laughs. "They'll learn a lot.

For instance, they'll learn that they're very lucky they don't have to live with me!"

In addition to the tour Jenny may well return to star in Grumpy Old Women Live again in the future, and a live DVD of the stage show comes out at Christmas.

"We just tapped into something," reflects the comic. "There are huge battalions of grumpy old women out there with rolled-up umbrellas and raincoats. Their fingers are itching to get out the rolling-pin and slap people around the back of the legs with it. We've opened the floodgates to them - it's an extraordinary sight seeing them all pouring into our gigs."

Grumpy Old Women Live has been an immense hit in this country and in Australia, but Jenny doubts that it will work in the most powerful nation on earth. "We'll never conquer America because they don't want anything with the word old' in it. They're allergic to it because it reminds them that they're going to die one day."

So with all this talk of getting old has she has matured, herself?

"No," Jenny howls with laughter. "I can't really say I'm older and wiser because at one point I pretend to be a pony!"