IPAC, August 28

Tickets here

"Kill the dolphins for their sweet meat!"

That's how Tim Ferguson thinks this story should start. An arresting first line, grab attention, raise some hackles.

He might know, given he teaches writing - writing for comedy, that is, not for newspapers.

Is it shock for shock's sake, or is there a more nuanced attack in Ferguson's absurdity?

He's not saying, and it's the right of a comedian to not have to explain. Get it or don't. And there are plenty of us who got the Doug Anthony All Stars.

Fans are mostly of a similar age. Almost 40, or 10 years older - but not 10 younger. Ask a 32-year-old and she probably won't have a clue who they are.

In the late '80s, we'd grown out of Fast Forward, laughed ourselves silly to The D-Generation and were ready for something with edge. DAAS were fearless. They blazed a trail through legendary performances at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the ABC's Big Gig show and their own series, DAAS Kapital.

Now they've grown up. Paul McDermott went on to host Good News Week, every night for about 100 years. Richard Fidler now has a long chat with someone and broadcasts it - that's a job. Tim Ferguson became the host of Don't Forget Your Toothbrush, a travel-prize game show on Channel 9.

The fans are ageing too. The stats on DAAS's Facebook page show most likes come from people aged 35-44.

So it's Gen X that will mostly fill the venues now the All Stars are back, with a slightly different line-up.

Paul "Flacco" Livingstone, a long-time All Stars sidekick, has taken the place of Fidler, who is busy with his brilliant Conversations show on ABC Radio.

Ferguson, 50, now teaches comedy to a younger generation at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. He also has multiple sclerosis (MS), a degenerative disease for which there is so far no cure. The onset of MS symptoms - then undiagnosed - helped split DAAS in 1994. It was hard to jump around on stage when his legs didn't respond.

Now he has plenty to be upbeat about - recently, DAAS finding a new audience thanks to a phenomenon they predated: mass internet.

"YouTube is like a free TV network," he said.

"What we've found with audiences is that there's a bandwidth of about a decade around our ages, and there's this whole new school of people under 25 who found us on YouTube in high school and at university.

"All of the shows we've had have shown a ridiculous amount of people who should be out at some kind of pop concert - like, really young people. I met one guy the other night who was trembling with excitement, trembling, and then Facebooked that this was the greatest experience of his short life.

"And he was there with two girls who were doing the same, they were fawning over Paul Livingstone: 'Flacco you're so funny ...'.

"If people are 30 they've got no idea, but if they're 20 they know all about us. It's encouraging that we still perform music that young people won't tell their parents about."

With borderline-taste jokes, blue language and boundary pushing, DAAS make kids feel older, smarter even.

Interviewing a comedian is tricky. You know they'll throw humour in as often as they can, but you need real answers as well. You find yourself laughing a lot. You resist the urge to make jokes yourself, lest you get treated to some sympathy laugher as they humour you.

Is there any point asking a serious question when Ferguson will just wind himself up with fantasies of driving up to Byron Bay to kill hippies, hunt dolphins, do a South Beach Crawl down the main street while honking his novelty horn?

Any point asking why they decided to get the band back together? Not much chance of a straight answer. Maybe he'd say this is the last chance before his multiple sclerosis makes touring impossible - and that wouldn't be funny at all.

And what about the MS, which has Ferguson performing in a wheelchair? Is it fair game? Of course.

"It's great," Ferguson says.

"Stand-up comedy? Why was I even trying? Sit-down comedy is even better. It's a piece of cake and, not only that, it's more comfortable. And I get pity. Pity is the beginning of laughter."

I decide to ask why they re-formed and the answer is simple: when they reunited to launch their DAAS Kapital DVD last year, it was great fun. Plus, having split abruptly, there was a sense of unfinished business. Unfinished funny business.

DAAS grew up in Canberra, in the mid-1980s, well before Canberra thought it was cool. They stood out.

"There was no underground so we became the underground," Ferguson said.

"It was a much sleepier national capital in the '80s and there was a tiny punk scene and we kind of made it an official punk scene by ourselves. Someone had to step into the breach. Someone had to reclaim the music and turn your lights on."

If punk music was a reaction to class-based conservative power, what are the All Stars - named after a National Party politician - bucking? Anyone they can.

"The tyranny of safety, combined with being in the birthplace of political correctness for Australia," Ferguson says.

"By the time we'd left Canberra we'd seen how political correctness worked from its very beginning. So when we arrived in the UK, where political correctness had been bubbling away under Margaret Thatcher, we knew exactly which sacred cows to kick. And they were sacred cows that no-one else was kicking.

"Ben Elton was not about to start making fun of socialism, feminism, Billy Bragg - he was not about to do any of that.

"We were distinctive purely because we were laughing about things the audience cared about deeply, and they saw this as incredibly risky.

"We just saw this as commonsense, to push back against political correctness. Now everybody pushes back against political correctness, which is why in the current show the Doug Anthony All Stars are calling for law and order, and shorter haircuts, and school uniforms at universities.

"Of course we still want to kill hippies. If I had my way I would drive to Byron Bay, drown a few hippies, and put as much fluoride into the water system as I possibly could."

He's off again. Try and pin the politics on the punk and he will start swinging. Political views? "We're at the comfortable anarchist centre of the political spectrum."

It may appear that comedians are more likely to be liberal or left-wing, rather than conservative. This can't be just because economic rationalism doesn't have space for indulgences such as laughter, unless it pays. So why? I asked.

"There's an expression 'punching upwards'," Ferguson explained.

"Comedy will have a better chance of getting laughs if the joke is aimed at those above - so people who are more powerful, or richer, or more famous, or just seem to be luckier, are much better targets for comedy because the audience feels morally free to laugh at them.

"Whereas if you're punching downwards, you're making jokes about homeless people, about desperate people, about boat people, and so the audience can feel uncomfortable."

And that's a gold-plated target for Ferguson.

"I have more fun cracking jokes about the Greens than I ever will about the poor Liberal Party. Everyone makes fun of the Liberal Party - they just had bad potty training, they don't know any different.

"But the Greens are placing themselves above everyone as being morally pure, the only soldiers marching in step, better than everybody else in the Parliament.

"The audience ... they expect the Greens will always be the good guys in jokes and Tony Abbott will be the bad guy. And that really is a bit of a cliche."

Does being a comedian make it easier to deal with a debilitating illness like MS? Or is it the philosopher in Ferguson that eases his pain? It's both.

"My life is a hoot," he said. "It's all a matter of perspective. I've got something in my way - everyone's got something in their way, even if they don't recognise it, because they're 17 and they haven't been told yet.

"Whether it's health, or personality, or maybe they're just plain ugly, everyone has to overcome something. I'm fortunate because I know exactly what it is I have to overcome, whereas some people never find out what it was that was stopping them from achieving their dreams."