Run! She’s heading right for us

I hate the Comedy Festival.
I hate it. I dread it. I fear it.
I like performing, and I like spending a month with my friends from all over Australia and world.
I hate the build up, the writing, the stressing, the doubting. You test it and trial it, but it’s always funny one night, awful the next.
One [...]

Spruik off! Except at Comedy Festival

I’m not a fan of hackneyed ‘oxford dictionary defines’ introductions to articles and speeches but, in this instance, I think it’s necessary to confess my ignorance, hoping I’m not the only one out there who didn’t know what spruiking was.
Lots of odd images and definitions came to mind: the garnisher of restaurant meals (’Hey, kitchen-hand! [...]

Send in the Clown

Tragedy, they say, is inherently funny. It’s why some of us (let’s face it, most of us) try desperately, often unsuccessfully, to stifle our guilty chortles at others’ misfortune. Comedic films such as The Royal Tenenbaums and The Squid and the Whale exemplify this exegesis of humour and calamity; although, it arguably gives little explanation [...]

Laugh Please, there’s a lady on stage

In another life in the late-80s and 90s, I was a stand-up comedienne. My childhood heroes were the Python team, The Goons, The Goodies and Billy Connolly. I had crushes on them all, except maybe Harry Secombe, probably because I wanted to be them.

It never occurred to me that gender might be an issue until I auditioned for my first university comedy review at Adelaide Uni. The director and everyone else laughed their heads off during my monologue, which if I recall rightly, contained some material about carrots and bottoms (their writing, not mine!).

Imagine my surprise when I was told I wasn’t going to be in the next show because the director thought I was too funny and, as they didn’t write humorous roles for women, I would get bored. He’s since gone on to be a well-known television comic. I’m not going to name him and, of course, I’m not bitter…much. The next year he wasn’t directing the review, I wrote my own skits and joined the team.

The only female comic role model, when I growing up, was Phyllis Diller. With her ‘I’m so ugly I can’t get laid’ routine, she was the ground breaking female comic. This humour wasn’t my cup of tea, and for the first and only time in my life, I really wished I were a guy. I’d thought I could be the seventh member of the Python gang. In fact, that title really belonged to Carole Cleveland who, though very talented, was never acknowledged as a member of the team. She was the straight woman.

After I graduated from drama school in Melbourne, Australia’s comedy capital, in the 80s, comedy was raging. The Last Laugh in Collingwood’s Smith Street was peaking and during every Melbourne International Comedy Festival, the upstairs room known as Le Joke would become La Joke’women-only for two weeks.

It seemed necessary then to give us a break. At most gigs if a woman were included in the line-up, she’d be the only one. It could get a little lonely. It’s not that the guys left you out, but it was definitely more of a ‘rock and roll’ scene.

It was during this early stint with comedy, when I enjoyed some reasonable success, that I heard the term ‘women’s humour’. Like it or not, that phrase had a sense of ‘lesser than’. It generally referred to jokes about relationships, children, the menstrual cycle and so on.

The term ‘men’s humour’ was never heard. Even if you were hysterically funny, you still hadn’t proved yourself worthy unless you got away from these traditionally female topics. The thing is that relationships, children, the menstrual cycle and all that girlie stuff is so much of who we are.

I’m pleased to report that, though still in the minority, the number of female comics has increase since the days of dear old Phyllis. There’s no more La Joke at The Last Laugh, but I can still single out some of the women in this year’s Festival. These performers represent a cross section of the new and the more experienced, the traditional and not so traditional. So laugh please, there’s a lady on stage.

Trading Spaces

Elegant, vintage, rough at the edges, Trades Hall is a venue worth seeing.
This historic building is a labyrinth of passages and stairwells that wind up, down and around and open out onto ornate, carpeted foyers and trendy warehouse spaces.
Like the advertising material in the dank subways of London’s Underground, posters follow the gradient of the [...]