Proper True Yarn

Part 4 with Clancy Sinnamon (CC Donut). His 19th birthday fell on Easter weekend while he was at uni on the Gold Coast, so he and a few mates loaded swags and beers into his 2006 Subaru Outback and headed for Yamba to camp. They ran out of daylight, found a stretch of beach near Ballina on Google Earth, and a mate drove them down a goat track straight onto the sand, no tyre pressures dropped. They bogged it twice, pushed it out once, then smelt the clutch go.

A group of blokes fishing up the beach in big Rangers wouldn't tow them, but said it was high tide so they'd be right. It pissed down rain, they slept in the car, and woke at 11am with the water lapping the wheels. The same fishermen were still there and still wouldn't help, but sent them 5km up the road to find a tractor. RACQ wouldn't go on the beach. Eventually they found a cane farm with 10 or 15 tractors in the yard, all "in for maintenance", but the son in law would do it for 150 bucks. The best part: getting towed past the lifesaver flags and kids building sandcastles. They were told a Pajero had washed into the ocean there the week before. A girl from college, Charlie, drove from the Gold Coast to rescue them and they all fell asleep in her car.

The Subi lived another 13 years until Clancy drowned it this year in the Balonne River near Dirranbandi, following a truck across on a filming job. The bow wave came over the windscreen and he had to be dragged out backwards. It's now in a car graveyard behind St George. Knuckles adds his own water crossing and Emu Park bogging yarns.

⚠️ Explicit content. Find CC Donut Comedy for more skits, including Stan Smith the scrap metal merchant.

Part 3 with Clancy Sinnamon (CC Donut), back to his first overseas trip at 19. First arvo in New York, overwhelmed in Times Square, an old lady offers him and his then missus a free personality test. He reckons it might teach him something about himself, follows her down a back alley and straight into a big Scientology building. They sit him at a little desk with a divider and a hundred multiple choice questions, so he does what he always did at school: ACDC all the way down the page and hands it in.

They pull him out to a back room, deeper into the building, where a bloke in a lab coat tells him his results show he's very unstable and unhappy. Clancy was having the time of his life, but took the path of least resistance, agreed he was very sad, and walked out with a Scientology book. The missus, who answered properly, came out stable and walked free. Next day the same lady tried to hand him a pamphlet in Times Square.

Same trip, he emptied his coins into a homeless man's cup in Washington, realised his squashed Disneyland souvenir coin went in too, and got caught reaching back into the cup. In France he learned to say "parlez vous français" thinking it meant "I don't speak French". In Dubai with the cricket he kept asking for ham and pineapple pizza.

Then the origin of CC Donut: his mum called him CC, and a mate at cricket started calling him "cinnamon donut". He talks about where the skits come from, including the viral 120 slump video shot at a mate's dad's concrete batching plant out of Mitchell, where Clancy jumped under a truck pouring straight water and had to be hosed down, and the livestock agent skits inspired by his brother that stirred a few people up.

⚠️ Explicit content. Follow CC Donut Comedy for Clancy's skits.

Part 2 with Clancy Sinnamon (CC Donut) and more from his years on the road with the Australian cricket team. In 2021, right in the middle of COVID, the squad flew a charter to the West Indies, Clancy in seat 1A for his first ever taste of business class, then on to Bangladesh. A month into tour they were locked in a five star hotel 24/7, looking out at real poverty on the street, playing a lot of table tennis. Pressure cooker.

Then Australia started losing to Bangladesh. Before the third game Justin Langer pulled Clancy aside and asked him to tell the team a joke. He went with a Norm Macdonald one about three midgets on a night out, which landed with the boys. Australia went out and lost anyway, and with it the series, the first time Bangladesh had ever beaten them in one.

With the Aussies looking like a sad sack, Clancy filmed the Bangladesh players celebrating, cut a two minute package back at the hotel, tacked on a clip of them singing their team song, and sent it to the boss in Australia. Next morning in the COVID test line he heard the team manager giving his colleague an absolute spray for posting it. Clancy kept his head down, the colleague copped it sweet, then copped another tune up from the coach at brekkie. By the time they hit hotel quarantine back home it was in the papers, with memes and face swaps to follow. It's all under the bridge now, and the highlight of those years was the night out in London after the World Test Championship final win over India.

⚠️ Explicit content. Follow CC Donut Comedy for Clancy's skits.

Part 1 with Clancy Sinnamon, better known online as CC Donut. Born in Miles and raised in Jackson, a town between Miles and Roma on the Warrego with no pub, no store and nothing at all. He reckons it once came in seventh poorest postcode in the country on a Channel 7 list. After boarding school he went to the Gold Coast to study film and television, and his first full time job was travelling with the Australian cricket team as their videographer.

He started the same day Marnus Labuschagne, Travis Head and Aaron Finch debuted in Dubai, filmed them getting their baggy greens, and did four and a half years on the road before coming back for the Amazon doco The Test in England. Yes, the dressing room question comes up. His theory is the blokes with medium sized ones are the ones who get it out the most.

The big yarn: on a London tour, a few beers deep at the hotel in Chelsea Harbour, Clancy wandered down to a jetty on the Thames, walked through a gate and it slammed and locked behind him. Freezing wind off the river, his only options were swimming the Thames to a ladder 30 metres away or sleeping out there, so he rang team security, a little Italian bloke called Frank, who turned up with two big bald security blokes. First thing Frank did was photograph him and send it to the whole team. Then the ICC integrity man, a big Irish fella, pulled Clancy aside at the ground and told him a lot of prostitutes work that part of London, so was there anything he wanted to tell him. It was a stitch up, Nathan Lyon still messages him to stay off the jetties, and it was the moment the boys let him in.

⚠️ Explicit content. Follow CC Donut Comedy for Clancy's skits.

Part 5 and Buster Kirby flips the show, taking the host chair to drag a few untold yarns out of Knuckles, with producer Zak there as the witness. Knuckles is the bloke who can go three or four days without a weakness. Turns out there is one: tequila. In Vegas at Ole Red, Blake Shelton's four level bar, someone drove a Clase Azul shot into him and he spewed all over Paul White, the former Broncos CEO, on their first meeting, with Tommy Busby from Busby Marou nearly jumping off the balcony. Security came over to ask if he wanted another drink. On the way out he tried to fight 14 Irish blokes.

Then the night Knuckles' son learned to crawl. He was FaceTiming his wife from a booth at a Rick Ross show while the boys yelled at him to hurry up. Zak went home early and woke to what sounded like a water feature in the room. Knuckles was standing at the foot of his own bed, pants down, pissing on it. "What are you doing?" "I'm fucking pissing in the bed." He finished, lay down in it and went straight to sleep with his feet in the wet patch.

One more for the road. After a big charity lunch in Brisbane, the crew were on the piss at Eagle Street Pier when a bloke parked his Merc out the front, left it running and walked across to the fig trees on what looked a lot like a drug deal. Knuckles jumped in and bounced it off the rev limiter. Old mate sprinted back and started throwing punches, the video looks like a stabbing, a water bottle hit one of the wives and someone kicked his back panel in.

⚠️ Explicit content. Spot one of Country Trucker Caps on a Vegas cabbie? That'll be Jamali, he listens.

Part 4 with Buster Kirby, and the second Vegas yarn is the big one. The lady at the gun range looked him up and down and said "the big boy ain't making it on foot, darling". He walked anyway, in thongs, to Planet 13 on Sammy Davis Jr Drive, got knocked back for not having his passport, bought new walkers and a plastic yard glass of coconut rum, and lost six kilos on the trip.

Next morning, passports in hand, he and Angie jump in an Uber. Big Texan looking bloke, big hat, big Chevy. He asks why they're going to Planet 13, says that's where the tourists go and he'll take them where the locals go. Buster says no thanks. The driver opens the glove box and pulls out a .44 Magnum. Angie gets out. The doors lock, the Uber app goes off, and they head out into the Mojave with Buster dropping pins to his wife the whole way, confessing his regrets by text and telling her to go see the hookers without him.

It finishes at a strip mall: a laundromat, a 7 Eleven, and three blacked out shops with a steel door. Three bangs, a slot slides open, passport held up but never handed over, and inside it's a shiny chemist full of bud. They hand him a basket and a menu, he buys a marijuana cigar, pre rolls and gummies, and qualifies medically when they ask about depression or anxiety: "fucking both". On the way back the driver pulls over, splits a joint with him and admits that 10 minutes in, he decided not to kill him. Plus Fremont Street, a cop asking which part of Britain he's from, and the Heart Attack Grill scales.

⚠️ Explicit content. Buster Kirby is heading back to Vegas next year, catch him on tour before then.

Part 3 with Buster Kirby, and it's the first leg of his Vegas trip, the one his wife Angie literally had to drag him to the airport for. He's already rebooked: two and a half weeks next year, flying into Dallas, then a week around Austin trying to get a spot on Kill Tony. The flight over was rough. Someone told him to wear compression stockings, so he cut the feet off them because they annoyed him, and landed with feet like basketballs. A panic attack sorted the rest. The upside: the first snow he ever saw was on the mountains flying into Las Vegas.

On Knuckles' advice he and Angie booked Battlefield Vegas, about a grand Australian to shoot everything a bloke from a 12 gauge and .22 background never gets near, AR-15 and .50 cal included. While they were waiting on the pager, his mate Keith, a cop in Oklahoma, rang and asked what he was shooting. Buster rattled off the list, said AR-15, and Keith told him to open his phone.

It was Keith's body cam from the night before. A welfare check off a 911 call, he pulls up the driveway, leans forward to tap the screen in his cruiser, and a bloke walks off the veranda and empties an AR-15 magazine through the windscreen. Hit in the arm, the chest and shrapnel in the neck, saved by his armour. He'd been given one day off. Buster sat in the corner feeling sick, told him to quit, then went in and shot the guns anyway, including a .50 cal that lifted the two blokes holding it off the ground. The armed guard in the corner? "He's itching to do his job."

⚠️ Explicit content. Catch Buster Kirby live, he's on tour now.

Part 2 with Buster Kirby, and he's the first to say he doesn't condone drink driving. This is a yarn from his young days around Murwillumbah. His old man promised to buy him his first car, then just pulled his gear out of the family Sigma wagon and handed him the keys. Buster snapped the gear stick off driving it like a dickhead, Dad welded something on so it would go back in, and because the key was jammed in the ignition and the doors wouldn't lock, the only security was taking the gear stick with you to the party.

One night at 2am the local copper, drunk himself, offered to jump in and get Buster home. His mate, a straight laced cop from Sydney, sliced his hand on the wire hanging out of the Sigma's tyre, then sat on something in the passenger seat and pulled out the gear stick. "What does this do?" It changes gears, mate. Buster reckons it was the last time he ever drove after a drink.

Back then the coppers in town would just give you a lift home in the back of the wagon. So Buster booked one, a sergeant, for a 21st at the Condong Bowls Club. The sergeant said he had a probationary constable from Sydney with him and he'd put on a bit of a show dragging Buster to the car. Two days and a lot of beers later Buster forgot the plan, told him to get fucked, and the young bloke from Sydney snapped: baton, foot on the back of his head, cuffs, blood nose, his missus screaming and his mates ready to go. Turns out the rookie had been sent to the country to calm down. Buster is still good mates with the sergeant.

⚠️ Explicit content. Buster and the boys are also after sponsors for their sprint car, give him a shout.

Buster Kirby is back on the pod, and the last time he and Knuckles recorded together was in New Zealand, followed by an after party at Rock 2000 in Auckland where a mate stripped off to reveal a tribal tramp stamp on an angle. These days Buster is 45, living in the hills behind Byron near Nimbin, and has made a pact to go 10 years hard on the comedy before building a big fence around the farm at Tyalgum and raising cows. He also married his third cousin. They checked with Aunty Ollie, the family oracle, who reckoned they were related "sort of, but not close enough".

Then come the wedding yarns. At Buster's own wedding in the Catholic church at Murwillumbah, the priest was his wife's uncle, Father Paul, who asked best man Pig to get rid of his chewing gum. Pig gobbed it straight into the priest's hand and said "thanks bud". Knuckles tops it with his farm wedding: one of the bridesmaids got so smashed she spewed, shat and pissed through the motorhome he'd organised for the night, then passed out with the door locked. He and his new wife spent their wedding night in winter on a bare bed with no linen, and a couple of weeks later he got a $180 cleaning bill.

Buster never gets asked to be a groomsman, he's always the MC, "because I'm the fat, loud guy". At his best mate Clancy Fallon's wedding up at Midginbil Hill behind Uki, Wendell Sailor turned up. Buster grabbed the mic, told 200 guests how nervous he was to be standing in front of his childhood hero, a bloke who could score from anywhere on the field, and asked everyone to put their hands together. Del stood up. Buster said "Ryan Hansen", a Q Cup second rower and goal kicker. Del sat straight down, ropeable, then copped a second one when Buster introduced Lote Tuqiri. He eyeballed Buster for an hour, then walked over with two glasses of champagne.

⚠️ Explicit content. Catch Buster Kirby on his comedy tour.

Part 4 with Jack from Bellmere Butcher, wrapping up the series. First things first: the shop is at 65 Bellmere Road in the heart of Bellmere, near Caboolture. It's a back to front shopping centre, so Jack is working on a giant sausage sign for the street so nobody drives past.

Jack's grown up around food, his parents ran Italian restaurants in town, and after 10 years inside the same four walls of less than 50 square metres, the new shop is how he keeps himself and his team interested. New creations are on hold until they've got the room to make them properly every day, not as a one off. Hot food is coming too, but no menu: whatever's in the hot box is what's available. No pies either, out of respect for the baker in the same centre.

The bigger plan is weekend smokers out the front with taste testers and advice, the same thing Jack does at home when 30 or 40 people turn up on a Sunday with the kegs on. His line is that it's not butchers against butchers, it's butchers against the big guys. To prove it, he and the butcher up the road have a golf buggy challenge running, and he's been called out to a go kart race on the other bloke's property. Loser donates to charity.

⚠️ Explicit content. Find Bellmere Butcher at 65 Bellmere Road, Bellmere, and keep an eye out for the new shop opening.