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the joke or the punch line. Now that I’ve developed myself, and settled into a role, I’m given a lot more freedom with what I can and can’t do.” Hammington may just be a normal guy while “off duty,” but once the cameras start rolling, his animated and silly childlike character take over. It’s not a fake side, he says, but a small part of his character exag- gerated for TV. “It’s like putting some ‘steroids’ into that part of you. It’s certainly not the whole me, it’s not the complete me. It’s just a part of me.” Ever since his childhood spent sitting next to his mom — Jan Russ, an influential former casting direc- tor of Australia’s “The Neighbours” — deconstructing actors’ performances and getting firsthand experience in seeing what directors are looking for, he’s worked on honing his skills at not only getting from point A to point B in a performance or skit, but the big picture of how it all connects. “I want to be able to put the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together. I break things down in my head and kind of work out how they all have to go hand in hand,” he says. “It’s a lot harder than you’d think.” Even today, he second-guesses every performance, beating himself up over whether he got the timing right or how he screwed up delivering a line. Timing is key in comedy, and if you’re performing in a language that is not your native tongue, it can be easy to miss that golden moment. There is always an anxiety about be- ing self-analytical, but he finds it essential for break- ing past mediocrity. It takes a lot of mental strength to work through it, he says. “You’d come off stage and punch walls and kick doors because you weren’t happy with your perfor- mance. That’s an everyday thing. I’d walk out of the studio and I’ll be like really pissed off, really angry,” he says of his “Gag Concert” skits years ago, but his self-criticisms still hold true. “You self-analyze and you’re like, ‘I missed this time and I missed this punch line.’ “But I think you need to be self-analytical. If you’re not, you just become mediocre. … I think you can talk to any artist in the world and they’ve all said the same thing. You’re always trying to outdo yourself.”