A moustachioed bloke in a brown leather jacket leans on a cane and puffs a cigarette beside a no smoking sign in the doorway of a Chinese restaurant in Brisbane.

The nation’s major television crews are inside jostling to interview this frail old fellow, a serial prison escaper who probably goes by a pseudonym and lives off grid somewhere in south-east Queensland. He is here for the announcement of a documentary on his life, but looks as worn out as the belt barely holding up his black jeans.

All this fuss when all he ever wanted, 33 years ago, was a succulent Chinese meal.

This is the man who calls himself Jack Karlson, star of what has been described as the preeminent Australian meme, which some regard as the most iconic piece of improvised theatre in the country’s modern history.

“It’s on the internet or something,” he nonchalantly says of the viral YouTube video before mustering his signature baritone to bark an order at the huddle of producers and camera operators.

“Whiskey!”

First uploaded in 2009, the old news clip shows Karlson’s 1991 arrest at the China Sea. Now the restaurant has moved to Milton and is “a bit more flash” he says, than when it was in Fortitude Valley – which in those days was a seedy stomping ground for the city’s crims, crooked cops and sex workers.

“Gentlemen, this is democracy manifest!” booms Karlson as his bear-like frame resists the hapless officers.

Then, a string of bombastic one-liners that would one day enter the Australian millennial vernacular.

“What is the charge? Eating a meal? A succulent Chinese meal?,” he demands of the police.

“Ah yes, I see that you know your judo well!”

The director of the upcoming documentary The Man who Ate a Succulent Chinese Meal, Heath Davis, says he was drawn to Karlson’s “performance” from the moment he first saw the arrest on the news as a boy.

“The best actors that I’ve encountered are people who’ve lived life,” he says.

“And nobody that I’ve ever encountered in my 46 years has lived life like Jack Karlson.”

For behind the meme is a story far more extraordinary than can be told in an 80-second social media clip.

Karlson’s prison escapes are instead evocative of films like O Brother, Where Art Thou and are said to include: picking the lock cuffing him to a sleeping officer and leaping from a moving train; swimming off a prison island before being rescued by a benevolent fisherman; and impersonating a detective to escort a fellow felon out the front door of lock up.

His childhood, though, was more akin to a Charles Dickens novel. Much of it was spent in institutions full of perverts and, later, he did stints in some of the country’s most notorious prisons. His life on the outside, too, was marred by unimaginable horror, including the murder of his wife by a serial killer.

“We started out making a comedy and quickly discovered this was a Shakespearean tragedy,” Davis says.

Yet, in the face of everything life could throw at him – even a recent terminal cancer diagnosis – Karlson has chosen to laugh.

“He is the last Australian larrikin,” the director says. “He is just Jack. For better or worse.

Except that he probably isn’t.

The documentary’s associate producer and author of a nonfiction book inspired by his life, Mark Dapin, believes Karlson’s name is really Cecil George Edwards.

“A judge once said to him you’ve got eight aliases,” Dapin says. “I suspect he’s had a lot more than that.”

Karlson – let’s stick with that for now – tells me he has probably had 10, he can’t remember. One nickname he can recall, though, is The Hun, given to him by his former cellmate, armed robber, alcoholic and award-winning playwright, the late Jim McNeil, after Karlson taught himself German in prison.

“A lot of the screws in those days were pommies,” Karslon explains of the English guards who would often bash him. “I thought that would upset them.”

Now Karslon is hoping for one last, ironic laugh when he enters the movie theatre to see himself on the big screen. Because back in the day, he says, he used to enter the pictures to crack their safes.

“In those days cinemas used to have a bit of money in ‘em,” he explains.

Then, for the cameras mainly, the old crook chows down a mouthful of succulent sweet and sour pork with prawn fried rice.

• The Man who Ate a Succulent Chinese Meal is set for release in March 2025