“IT really should’ve been called ‘Moby Dickheads’,” comedian Colin Lane opines about his part in the spoof version of Herman Melville’s classic novel by popular duo Lano and Woodley.

In a fast-moving exploration of the story, first seen at the Melbourne Comedy Festival and about to hit the whale-sized stage of the Canberra Theatre, Lano sets himself up as the straight man to Frank Woodley, who attempts to undermine him at every point even as, accompanied by creepy music, he tries to tell the tale as a serious narrative. Fat chance of that. 

“Moby Dick” is one of the greatest novels in world literature, both in significance and sheer size, but strangely enough, it has always attracted actors wanting to do it on a smaller scale. 

Lano mostly inhabits the larger-than-life figure of Captain Ahab – Gregory Peck in the 1956 movie – a byword for obsession as he circumnavigates the globe in search of his nemesis, the great white whale, Moby Dick.

You get to know an awful lot about whales when you read the novel, as the two of them found in preparing for their show.

“I’m not sure how many literary editors there were in 1851,” Lano wonders, “but in the 700-odd pages [and 135 chapters] of the original, it covers religion, philology, zoology and weather science… There’s a reflection on how white is possibly an evil colour, as with a polar bear, so that it can attract its prey”.

No wonder the duo, as they did in their previous show about the Wright Brothers, had to burrow down deep to find the essence, but as they did, a certain grand comic madness emerged in the Melville novel, which reeks of doom and gloom, as Ishmael the narrator unveils the themes of revenge and madness and shows how the crew is seduced into Capt Ahab’s quest.

And because Woodley tries to sabotage Lano at all turns, it’s led him to reflect: “Frank has been my nemesis for the last 20 years – he’s my white whale.”

But considering what’s funny, “Moby Dick” is full of what he calls “comic fodder”, with Ahab’s pegleg, the motley crew, the skull and crossbones elements and the fact that every time they turned on the TV for some reason they saw “Moby Dick” references, so firmly has it entered popular culture.

Mind you, one of their friends asked recently whether Capt Ahab dies. 

Spoiler alert here – he does. Only Ishmael survives to tell the tale and anyway, they pretty well tell the whole story in a song at the beginning.

Woodley pretends to bridle at my suggestion that he represents what Lano calls “tomfoolery and naivete”, but is happy enough to be described as an “everyman”. 

“I hadn’t read the book, but I loved the Gregory Peck film and watched it lots of times on Bill Collins’ ‘Golden Years of Hollywood’ as a kid.”

So, when Lano suggested it to him, he thought it was a good idea, but then he had to read it. 

“There are around 700 pages and probably only about 150 are covered in the film – it’s a pretty bizarre book,” he says.

To Woodley, the novel is “a cross between a natural-history documentary and a thesis about whaling,” but he also thinks that “these days there would be an editor who would come down hard on Melville, I think that at the time in the 1850s, they needed to have a great figure in literature. 

Once into the book, he, like Lano, discovered that obsession and madness are very close to comedy.

“We both knew that we could use the dark moodiness of Capt Ahab as a counterpoint for our own silly nonsense,” Woodley says. “For the first 20 minutes Colin tries to set up a serious literary mood, but I’m there to undermine that.” 

So how does he do that?

Well even the first line, “Call me Ishmael”, one of the most famous lines in literature, is up for grabs. “Is that an actual name?” he interrupts, then goes off at “a crazy tangent, which results in my using a pigeon as a telephone”.

“Colin’s been scarred by his relationship to me,” Woodley confides out loud. “By the end of the show, possibly he himself has become mad like Capt Ahab and is determined to kill me – if he can.”

Lano & Woodley’s “Moby Dick”, Canberra Theatre, June 8-11, Book at canberratheatrecentre.com.au or 6275 2700.