From left: the comedians Jenny Tian; Alexandra Hudson; Kate Dolan; and Sashi Perera, all photographed in Sydney in June. Photography by Nic Walker / Hair and makeup by Desiree Wise / Wardrobe courtesy of Olivia Simpson. That set killed. The joke annihilated the crowd. Language associated with stand-up comedy has traditionally favoured aggressive terminology, a trait that is encouraged in men, but actively discouraged in women. Even the act itself — standing centrestage, fearlessly broadcasting your opinions, thoughts and observations — is one that women have traditionally been barred from. And let’s not get started on the pervasive belief that women are inherently not funny.
Fortunately, the tide is turning. Female comedians’ success in television show writing rooms is now translating to stand-up comedy, and with the stories as varied and multifaceted as the women themselves, audiences are laughing harder than ever. Here, four female comedians let us in on the joke.
Jenny Tian,
The Influencer: Four years ago, she considered giving up stand-up comedy — then she found her audience on social media.
I first saw Jenny Tian perform between Sydney’s two lockdowns, in front of a handful of locals desperate for a laugh in a small pub’s basement. Afterwards, the comedians, including Tian, stayed around for some truly awful house wine, all of us relishing the opportunity to be shoulder to shoulder with strangers again. It was, as it turns out, around the time that the comedian contemplated giving up comedy. Then, thrust into lockdown again soon afterwards, she found an online audience.
“I had been doing stand-up comedy for about four years before I started posting on TikTok,” Tian recounts to me four years later. Up until then, the comedian’s most consistent interaction with social media was updating her Facebook profile picture once a year, out of obligation. “I was famously known in the stand-up scene for not having Instagram or posting anything to socials,” Tian says. “How the times have changed!” As I write, Tian has 339,000 followers on TikTok and 198,000 followers on Instagram (“An absolute peasant on Facebook,” she quips in her current stand-up show, “Chinese Australian: A Tale of Internet Fame”, referring to her still-substantial 19,000 followers on that platform).
“I never saw myself posting on social media,” Tian says. “Of course, after posting my comedy, I’ve been overwhelmed by the response. Sometimes I wonder why anyone watches what I do because it’s all so silly, but I’m so grateful I’ve got an audience. It means that I’ve been able to do what I love: comedy.
“This might be a hot take, but I think social media has a positive influence on comedy,” Tian continues. “There’s so much more material online and it’s highly consumable to the average person.” Tian references her friends, who, like so much of the public, never knew what the term “crowd work” meant until that style of comedy found a social media following. “The comedy literacy of the average person is changing because they’re being exposed to more of it,” Tian says. “Hopefully, what this means is that more audiences are coming to see shows. As they should! It’s the best time.”
Tian’s relationship with social media success is the subject of “Chinese Australian”, Tian’s second show. Worlds apart from the set she shared with several comedians years ago, there are many hundreds in the one venue to see her alone for what is her biggest show yet. Structured like “a big doomscroll”, the show includes a PowerPoint presentation with more than 150 slides, a sketch and audience interaction (“which I’d never done before,” she adds). In her own words, the “best time”.
In addition to exploring the ironies of content creation and the commercialisation of comedy, the show touches on the more painful effects of a career spent online. “I think it’s the most vulnerable show I’ll do for a while because I’m quite honest about what goes on behind all the likes, views and comments,” Tian says. In a particularly poignant part of the show, Tian reflects on her hesitation over uploading her first hour of comedy to YouTube, knowing that there will be those who will immediately conclude she’s “a woman, so not funny; Asian, so not Australian”.
Happily — judging by the growing numbers at Tian’s shows and by her being cast in the nationally broadcast variety show “Taskmaster”, among other successes — it’s evident the number of people sharing such ignorant sentiments are dwindling. “Since I’ve been doing stand-up, there have been more women than ever in the scene, which is so exciting,” Tian says. She recounts the days of signing up to open mics and feeling lucky if there was even one other woman on the line-up. “It’s come a long way, but there’s still further to go,” she says. “There are still a lot of people who hold the belief that women aren’t funny.” The more women stand-ups there are, she says, “the more we can prove them wrong”.
Alexandra Hudson,
The Tension Seeker: As a woman with disability, Hudson draws
on her experiences navigating the world
to make her audience squirm.
There are mental and emotional obstacles that every stand-up comedian must overcome during their career. The fear of “bombing” on stage; the difficulty of financial insecurity. Less well known are the physical barriers faced by some. Like so many public environments, comedy venues and stages often don’t accommodate those with physical disabilities. Of the 400-odd gigs that Alexandra Hudson has performed so far, the comedian estimates that three, maybe five, of the stages have been accessible.
“I was doing my first solo,” she recounts, during a moment of recovery between a string of Melbourne shows and a stint in Brisbane. In an unfortunate turn of events, she says, there were three steps up to the stage and no emcee, so no one to give her assistance. “It was only a little stage, but there was no railing, and I had to just kind of cling on to the wall and then the curtain,” she recalls. Following her act, her sound technician helped her off the stage.
“I just had this moment of, like, ‘Oh, I can’t even get onto my own stage properly.’ I have to think about so much before I even get onto the stage,” she says. “I can’t imagine what that is like to not have to do that — to only think about your performance.”
It’s experiences like these that inform much of Hudson’s stand-up comedy. As a person with cerebral palsy, she sees disability as something that enhances, rather than inhibits, humour. “Often we’re funnier, and we have way darker senses of humour, because we’ve had to navigate a world that’s not made for us,” Hudson says. “We’re constantly having to push back against how people feel and think about us and interact with us. And there’s so much humour in that.”
Hudson’s favourite joke of her own to date refers to Section 216 of Queensland’s Criminal Code, which criminalises sexual activity with a person who has an “impairment of the mind”. The provision has drawn criticism from disability advocates, given that even those who might have the ability of critical thinking and consent are denied the agency to engage in sexual relationships. “So, basically, the punchline is, ‘I love to have sex in Queensland, because if I don’t, if a guy doesn’t make me come, I put them away for 14 years,’ ” Hudson says, smiling. “And I love it because people are like, ‘Oh, my God, what’s this law?’ ”
The unease of people without disability, as they internally struggle with whether or not they can laugh at some of the more ludicrous experiences Hudson’s disability engenders, is a conflict the comedian enjoys witnessing. “Comedy is all about tension, and I’m lucky because my existence just creates a lot of tension for other people. And that is so funny to me,” she says. “It’s not like I’m intentionally making people uncomfortable,” she continues. “I don’t enjoy it if they take it so far to the point that they don’t laugh at all, ever, and they can’t let go of it. But I like to point that out and I like the friction it creates, because then my job is to ultimately make them laugh.”
Hudson believes the reason many people “don’t want disability around” is due to a sense of their own fragility. She says: “Disability is the only certainty in life. Whether it be through old age or injury or whatever, it’s an inevitable part of life.”
The normality of disability is something that Hudson hopes audiences take away from her shows. “Like, we don’t have to be Paralympians. We don’t have to be celebrated,” she says. Hudson reflects on the pressure for any minority to be exemplary in their chosen field. But what if disabled comedians could be on a line-up, have ready access to their stage and not have to be the funniest performer on the night? “If we have a job, we can be celebrated because we work hard and we want to achieve things,” she says. “We’re just out here and we’re living. Like, that’s it.”
Sashi Perera,
The Boundary Pusher: The former refugee lawyer finds respite from the everyday through her comedy — winning over audiences along the way.
What motivates someone to take the stage for the first time on an open mic night? “Epic, epic boredom. Like, epic boredom,” Sashi Perera says, laughing.
I inform her that I too have been very bored at times, yet have never felt the urge to be so vulnerable in front of a crowd of strangers. “I don’t know if all of us comedians just have our brains wired differently, where we just don’t feel like it’s a weird thing to stand up in front of a bunch of people,” she offers. “I was just kind of, like, why wouldn’t you? Everyone’s got a cool story to tell — just get up there, say stuff.”
Perera’s own story is less conventional than that of most other comedians. A former refugee lawyer, Perera insists that some skills from her former occupation translate to her stand-up comedy career. “Your analytical skills, you do a lot of research, you have to present, like being in a courtroom,” she lists. “And presenting your case is very much having to stand up and believe in what you’re saying, or have a very good reason for what you’re saying.” She concedes that as a lawyer in court, “you don’t get to make people laugh as much, but there are some skills that transfer back and forth”.
Female comedians, particularly women of colour, will often cite the “white male comedian” archetype as a barrier to overcome when pursuing comedy, but Perera found the most resistance actually came from her own culture. “You’re not taught to be loud or funny as a Sri Lankan woman. You are silent and quiet and obedient,” Perera says. “And so I think it took me a long time to speak openly. And be OK with how loud I was and how open I was.”
Once she did open up, audiences responded. A viral clip of her joking about counselling and the “browndaries” she grew up with (“Draw a circle around yourself … only the whole island of Sri Lanka is in it”) has 84,000 likes at the time of writing. The renowned comedian Hasan Minhaj even privately messaged her on Instagram, praising one of her videos. “And I think that because that first barrier was crossed for me, I felt like, ‘OK, give me the mic,’ ” Perera says. “I’m not going to shut up now.”
In addition to her reality as a Sri Lankan-Australian woman, Perera has been frank with audiences about her experience of miscarriage. She and her husband first went through the loss three years ago, and in that same year, twice again. The week before our interview, the comedian posted a photo of herself smiling on Instagram, fingers in the peace sign, lying in a hospital bed. As her caption explained, she was now navigating a fourth miscarriage during a comedy festival.
“I’ve always been open about what’s been going on with my life, and I thought, this is just another part of life,” she says, touching on the secrecy that this type of loss is often shrouded in. “And the more that it becomes another part of life, the more we’ll all be able to treat it as such. Because there’s so many of us going through this.”
I ask about the decision to perform in the immediate aftermath of her miscarriages, during her healing process. “What I learned was that comedy was that thing that was going to get me through,” Perera answers. “Because I don’t just enjoy doing comedy. I love watching comedy,” she says. “I just love being in that setting. Especially because in the daytime, I’m at that age when all of my friends have kids, all my social obligations come with being with people with children and they’re talking about their kids.
“And that’s really lovely,” she continues. “But it’s daily life that makes me sad because everyone’s living life a certain type of way. And I would really like to live it that way as well. But being able to disappear into the comedy world means that everyone’s living life in so many different ways. Like there’s no one way to live life, and I’m seeing what life might be without kids, and it’s OK.”
Comedy is a vehicle to remove her from “all of that stuff, which is exactly what comedy is supposed to do. Be a salve to the everyday.”
Perera is currently touring with “Boundaries”, a reflection on her relationship with her partner, Charlie, and the often humorous tensions that can arise from a cross-cultural relationship. Before that was “Endings”, which explored the dissolvement of an engagement. The next will be similarly personal, about her fertility journey — just don’t expect it anytime soon. “I can’t write about traumatic things and make them funny until I have processed it and had enough distance from it,” she says. “So I think that is what the next show is going to be about. But I don’t know how to make it funny yet.”
Kate Dolan,
The Transformer: She won over the internet with her bold and brash roles, but this year the comedian introduces audiences to her greatest character yet: herself.
Kate Dolan knows her brand of comedy isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. “Lots of comics say you should be able to play every room, which I totally disagree with,” she says over Zoom one afternoon. “I personally think if you can play every room, you are safe. There’s some safety in what you’re doing. And I sometimes think that to be divisive, to have people who love it or hate it, means that you’re doing something unique or unusual.”
In Dolan’s case, the unique and unusual elements are the larger-than-life characters she inhabits, both in her stand-up and for her social media followers. One character Dolan has spent a lot of time developing is the brash but ultimately loveable Don Nolan. “I’m from a really small village in the UK, so he’s definitely inspired by some of the characters that I grew up with, feeling lost in how to be a man,” she says. Don is an amateur boxer, but he has never had a fight in his life. “He’s a real sweetheart deep down, but he’s always on the defence, always a bit of a Billy Bulls****er,” Dolan explains, using a crude term for a liar.
Still, despite the bravado, Dolan has found it easier to be Don than to be herself on stage, noting that people find a “loud, seemingly confident, brash woman” more difficult to accept. She adds about performing as Don, “It’s also really nice for me because it feels like I’m embodying a completely different person. Gives me a break from myself. To be honest, I don’t mind being Don.”
Comedy as a salve or “survival tactic”, as she puts it, started in Dolan’s youth. “When people are putting worth into young women, unfortunately oftentimes it’s on appearance,” she says. “Then if you’re really good at sport, that’s how you find your place. And I think, like many people, I was picked on at school, and the way that I could protect myself was by making jokes — making sure that I had a level of protection by being the class clown, because then people like you for that reason.”
Dolan’s mum had multiple sclerosis throughout Dolan’s childhood, which meant that the comedian would often have to be quiet in the house. “She had to take a lot of medication and so would be sleeping in the afternoon,” Dolan recalls. “So when you get home from school, there wasn’t really time to scream or run around like kids do. And we kind of had to be considerate in the house in case she was sleeping.”
Those experiences shaped Dolan’s persona. “I think that’s why, when I’m around people, I’m this huge version of myself,” she says. “Because I’ve been, like, keeping it in, making sure I’m quiet — this or that.”
Dolan’s perspective on her comedy career — and her preference to create a layer of distance between her and the audience through her characters — changed in 2021, when she experienced life-changing grief, through several losses. There were the months of lockdown in Sydney during the pandemic, followed by the death of a young child close to her. All of this was preceded by the death of her mother.
“OK, so Tony, who’s 55, didn’t like you at the Comedy Store [in Sydney]. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. That’s what would have kept me back before,” she says, rolling her eyes. “But now, it’s, like, tomorrow’s a new day and every day we get the chance to take the risk, take the chance, live your life as fully as you can in that moment.”
“A Different Kind of Unhinged”, the show that Dolan is now touring, is her reflection on that transformative time of her life. Not as Don Nolan or any other character, but as herself. “I think everybody feels like they’ve wanted something, whether it’s to write a book, or learn a language, or see a landmark,” she says. “How can we be living in a way that we’re working towards those things that we really, really want?
“Let’s not let go so easily of the things that we’ve dreamed.”
