IF you want to see the next Shortis and Simpson comedy show in Canberra, forget it, your chances are Buckley’s or none.

The popular Bungendore satirical duo, who will be appearing at the Artists’ Shed in Fyshwick until November 29, still have such a loyal following that all seven shows have been booked out for weeks.

“We started out agreeing to do three shows, then it was five and then it was seven,” John Shortis says, as he and partner Moya Simpson rejoice over a coffee at the Queanbeyan Riverside Cafe.

“The last thing we did was a fundraiser at Cobargo after the fires – after that, lockdown, not a gig in sight,” Simpson says.

It’s been a testing time for the duo, for whom performing is easy but creating original material much more demanding.

Nonetheless they’ve come up with a show called “Going Viral”, a satire for the new normal.

In it, Donald Trump makes an appearance or two, but as the show opens just after the Presidential election, they’ll be on their toes.

They’ve done that before when, in 1999, their show at The Street, “Stop Laughing This Is Serious”, coincided with the Referendum on the Republic. When the results came through via radio, depression set in.

“There’s nothing harder than doing comedy to an audience with long faces,” Shortis says.

Fans can be sure all the obvious targets will be covered – “socialist” ScoMo and “chairman” Dan, panic-buying of toilet paper, sanitising, social distancing and lockdown.

“Gladys is trying to save koalas, and herself, and nothing will save John Barilaro. The only good news is that we have got our own back at the Poms by sending Tony Abbott back where he came from,” they say.

Naturally one song is about Zoom and another about the Covid app, which the self-confessed “Luddite” pair eschewed until they heard Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce were doing the same.

To provide a pandemic perspective, Shortis has been reading all the “Sydney Morning Herald”s of 1918-19 to come up with a special song about the Spanish flu.

But fun as it sounds, as surreal images mounted of main streets empty, garbage spilt and foxes moving back into town, Shortis and Simpson looked around for an occupation and decided on autobiography.

“I asked myself how to survive, so I decided to get into writing, but I’m not the writer,” Simpson says. 

“I quickly turned my writing into a story of voices, which is what I do well.”

“Moya Simpson’s Voices (72 years in 90 minutes)” is now on Soundcloud, recorded professionally in Kimmo Vennonen’s sound studio.

“I like the brevity of it, I can cover 17 years in 20 minutes… I’m British, so mine is divided into the British half and the Australian half. It’s for people who know me, who like my accents and my mimicking.”

Shortis, by contrast, is very much the writer and says, “I can’t read aloud, anything I read sounds like a reading”. But with no deadline, he fiddled with words. His dad had written an autobiography so there were things he wanted to tell his own children, too. But it was getting out of hand.

Then Shortis realised it would work better if he were interviewed by long-time colleague and former Canberran, Peter J Casey, the piano man and wordsmith who’s been writing satirical sketches for Queenie Van De Zandt and other artists from his home in Wagga Wagga.

“I asked Peter to interview me and while I’ve given him a few dates and a few dark cases that I want him to mention, I told him not to tell me what he’s going to ask,” he says.

While they appreciate the satirical end of the burlesque spectrum in artists like Meow Meow, their understanding of satire is, they feel, “an older style, from another era”. Young satirists are more “in yer face” and may never have heard of the songs they parody.

Politics is never too far from the minds of Shortis and Simpson. Back in the 1990s, Shortis wrote a song every week for ABC radio and over the years they’ve covered everything from the GST to Julia Gillard’s knifing of Kevin Rudd. 

Right now they’re looking at the way the Federal Government is treating artists, with the Prime Minister focusing on tradies while ignoring the creators. It makes them hopping mad.

“Moya Simpson’s Voices – 72 years in 90 minutes” is on Soundcloud. 

“Going Viral” at The Artists Shed, 88 Wollongong Street, Fyshwick, until November 29, details here.