The multi-talented Shaun Micallef has used his love of sitcoms to write his first full-length novel, De’Ath Takes a Holiday, a Gothic romance featuring Richard Bracegirdle, his lovely if wayward wife Winsome and the dilettante vampire, Comte De’Ath, who realises he would like to die after all.

“It’s almost like doing sketch comedy again but it’s a more literary approach so I get to pretend for a moment to be Robert Louis Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), the Elephant Man and Sigmund Freud,” Micallef says. “That sort of approach appeals to me.”

Micallef, who went to Sacred Heart College then studied law at the University of Adelaide, frames the story of the Comte’s blood-soaked travels through a series of historic lenses, among them the stolen transcripts of therapy sessions between the 18th century Austrian founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and the Comte De’Ath whose patient records include his age (180), his job (founder of De’Ath Cotton Goods) and widowhood status (six).

Micallef’s is so practised at getting inside a character’s head he was hearing their voices as he wrote. He says the knack was acquired during the decade he spent writing and starring in the ABC’s Mad as Hell, a weekly news breakdown that skewered politics and current affairs, always with an eye for a joke. Taking on the Gothic genre was much more of a literary venture that took him back to books he loved in his teens. His reading list included Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the original Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and a special favourite, Samuel Butler’s Victorian legal satire, Erewhon in which society treats illness and ugliness as a crime while criminals are thought of as infected.

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The historical connections are many and the book opens with a slave ship being wrecked in a storm just as a shaman on board mistimes a spell to bring back the dead. Slavery, we hear a businessman argue, is a necessary foundation for success and to threaten its abolition is to hinder economic progress, an argument often heard in relation to climate change. He casts his satirical net wide, tracing the birth of corporations with power but no conscience to the moment when Freud introducing Henry Ford to the idea of automated assembly lines. Queen Victoria, meanwhile, gets involved in solving the problems of the Middle-East.

“There are a lot of problematic views you can ascribe to Victorian mentality whose echoes and ripples are still felt today,” Micallef says. “That’s what I am hopeful of anyway, that it’s a kind of back-door satire of the way people still operate.”

Micallef, who practised law before chancing his luck has a performer, is not so much a stand-up comic but a serious person who is also funny. Growing up in Adelaide he trained with the pioneering Adelaide children’s troupe, Bunyip Theatre, where he learnt how to project his voice and work behind the scenes as curtain puller and lighting operator. But it was his involvement with the Adelaide University Footlights Club that taught him about performing in front of an audience, and showed him very quickly what worked and what didn’t.

“I think the timing I have is from what I learnt in those days,” he says. “Television is just frustrated theatre anyway and I can’t think I could make sense of performing on television were it not for the experience of the university revue.”

He says the spirit of Footlights still infects his work and credits most of his humour back to his time with them. More than 30 years later, he says not much has changed. “I think it’s clear the intention of the book is to ridicule and mock. As I say, I haven’t really learnt much since university days.”

The book’s central theme, that mortality is what makes life precious, is one of the big ideas Micallef says he would never be game to raise in a serious forum but which he is able to under the cover of humour. “It’s a stalking horse, or a Trojan horse perhaps, for some things I had been thinking about in a more serious way but I would never nakedly talk about,” he says. “If I’m good at anything, it’s wrapping them up in a joke.”

No outrageous gag is left untold (“If I wasn’t dead, I would sue” reads a cover note from Bram Stoker) even while Micallef takes on themes that include the mess the world is in and our abject failure to learn from history.

“As we’re seeing now in the world, there is a whole bunch of lessons that have never been learned or have been forgotten – or I suspect in the case of the American President, I don’t reckon he ever knew,” Micallef says. “With the first Trump administration, I thought well at least there’s not a war. Well, he’s proved me wrong… He’s really shored up his chances for the Nobel Peace Prize next year!”

Micallef regularly visits Adelaide where his parents, three sisters and various nephews and nieces live as well as his partner’s parents and brother. At a promotional event for the new book, a friend he went to school in the 1970s was in the audience and they met after. “I mean we’ve all changed in 45 years, but it was nice to see him – and he bought the book which was lovely of him,” Micallef says.

De’Ath Takes a Holiday by Shaun Micallef: Ultimo Press, $34,99