Dave Jory is a comedian who has six cats with his wife, and is about to do a comedy show at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival entitled “Dave Jory is a Cat Person.” If I didn’t live halfway around the world, I’d be there in a heartbeat! Dave was kind enough to answer some of Menandcats.com’s questions, and to refer to one of my lame jokes as “clever.”

Menandcats: Your six cats must provide you with LOTS of material for your upcoming comedy show “Dave Jory is a Cat Person.” How did you come up with the idea for this show? And what’s one of the funniest cat stories you have?

Dave: Yeah, six cats means there is always some sort of incident going on in the house.  But we also feed a few strays that constantly hang around our back door. One night we went out and accidentally left the back door wide open. When we returned, our six cats were in the kitchen entertaining several strays. Like coming home to find your teenage son is throwing an unauthorised party.

Menandcats: Do you have a favorite cat?

Dave: You have to love them all equally. That’s the rule, right?

Menandcats: How did you end up with six cats? Did you have cats before you met your wife? Was it like a feline Brady Bunch type situation where you combined feline households, did your wife already have the cats, or did you adopt them together?

Dave: Our cats are all rescued strays that we found. There is a real stray cat problem in our area (inner city Sydney) and we just kept finding these adorable litters of starving kittens cowering in the area behind our house. We’d bring them in to live in our bathroom for a few weeks (with their mother), then rehome them. But somewhere along the way, six of them tricked us in to keeping them. Before that we were a one goldfish family.

Menandcats: Do you think people judge you when you tell them you have six cats?

Dave: Yeah I did worry about that a bit. But cat lovers don’t care, do we?

Menandcats: Are you constantly covered in cat hair? How many vacuum cleaners do you own and how often do you have to vacuum?

Dave: We don’t have carpet in our house, which helps. But we are also really vigilant about keeping the place swept and mopped.

Menandcats: Since you are a professional comedian, why don’t you critique this joke I made to my husband via IM:

  Me: speaking of cats…

  I got an email from an Australian comedian 

  who is doing a show called “Dave Jory is a Cat Person” 

  Husband: they do comedy in australia? who knew

  Me: yeah, except their comedy runs counter-clockwise and ours goes clockwise

Dave: Clever! It’s hard to get the timing of a joke right on IM.

That’s Dave and one of his kitties, Louise.