Georgie Carroll: From ICU nurse to stand-up comedy

How an intensive care nurse at the Lyell McEwin traded saving lives for making people laugh.

Comedien, nurse and author Georgie Carroll. Picture: Jodie Nash

Adelaide’s Georgie Carroll is the comic poster girl for the weird and wonderful world of nursing, and the audiences at her stand-up shows are typically hospital workers looking for a fun night out.

She first tried public comedy at an open mike night at the city’s Rhino Room and most of those laughing and clapping were Carroll’s colleagues from the Lyell McEwin Hospital where she worked on the front line as an intensive care nurse.

“Because it was hospital staff and they don’t know what day it is, they just came out on a Thursday. They all like a good social and a laugh, so I just got up and told a few hospital stories,” says Carroll whose book, Off The Charts, bills her as Australia’s favourite nurse.

This was more than a decade ago and Carroll, extroverted by nature, was so exhilarated by the Rhino Room experience she barely slept.

She was already planning the next performance and within a year she was earning money on the Australian comedy circuit.

“Even then I didn’t count it as a job because in your head you’re thinking ‘a job has a pension, and it’s solid and there’s certain hours to it’, all of that,” she says. “But the opportunities kept growing.”

Adelaide comedian Georgie Carroll. Picture: Supplied.

Anyone who has heard Carroll speak will know she is from England’s north, in this case a pretty town at the foot of the Pennines called Rochdale on the River Roch but with Manchester’s infamous mills overshadowing the region. She lived in a lovely big home with her two brothers, a stay-at-home mother and a father who was an accounting entrepreneur.

“I lived somewhere rubbish but had a nice life in a rubbish place,” she says. “There were aqueducts and viaducts and all sorts of Victorian things and our house was gorgeous and I had my grandparents living (nearby). You’d just hop in and out of each other’s houses.”

Her main aim in life was to make people laugh and she grew up the class clown – one teacher’s report praised her ebullience while bemoaning the fact she never studied – but she idolised the singer (now actor) Billie Piper and left school wanting to be a pop star. “Then my grandma, who was adorable, said, ‘You know what, while you’re trying to be a pop star how about you try being a nurse at the same time?’,” Carroll says.

“She probably knew I was one at heart. And I can’t remember her exact words but it was basically, ‘You can dance and you can sing but I’m not sure they have chunky pop stars’.”

She took to nursing as if born to it and by 28 was married with two kids and a husband, a career and a house. She had everything yet it wasn’t enough.

At the time she would have struggled to explain why but she later diagnosed herself with wanderlust, which sounded romantic but was more destabilising than exciting.

“It was like being trapped. I was discontented and angry, very angry. Not aggressive angry and funny still but funny on the meaner side, that kind of thing,” she says. “I’d been in all the pubs, I’d owned all the pubs, I knew I needed something else.”

Carroll’s husband Steve fell in love with Adelaide during an Ashes tour. Picture: Phil Hillyard

When her husband, Steve, visited Adelaide on an Ashes tour he fell in love with the Adelaide Cricket Ground and praised the easy, open lifestyle. He wasn’t suggesting they move but it was enough to get her started on a visa application that in 2009 brought the family here with the typical British undertaking to “give it two years and see”.

“I knew within two weeks if not two days after I got here that it was the right thing,” she says. “But really, in terms of settling here, I thought we’d just start in Adelaide and drive to the next one if it’s not good. Adelaide just struck us as a nice place to bring up a three and a five-year-old, and it was.”

The performance bug didn’t kick in until she was 34. Until then she was at the Lyell McEwin, making her colleagues and patients laugh but never imagining an alternative career.

That first night at the Rhino Room was the start of a career in a professional art form she had not known existed.

“I thought it was just like karaoke, that people just got up and had a go,” she says.

She is now a regular on the national club circuit, did cruises before COVID, the Adelaide Fringe and the Melbourne Comedy Festival. She also sells out 70-seat performances at Gluttony and is on a national tour which includes two sold-out concerts at the Melbourne Arts Centre and the Sydney Seymour Centre, with one Adelaide show on May 7.

After more than a decade of stand-up, she is still a nurse at heart and much of her material revolves around hospitals, doctors, patients and nurses who provide an endless source of weird and wonderful stories.

Nursing humour is infamously dark but she has calibrated it over the years to make sure people leave feeling better than when they walked in.

“Absolutely it’s at the patient’s expense; it’s called gallows humour,” she laughs. “But I’ve certainly learnt over 10 years that there are certain things you can say at a barbecue or in the staff room that you don’t say onstage.”

The Lyell McEwin Hospital, Georgie Carroll’s former workplace

She is kinder in her jokes and less likely to laugh at situations where people really are on the line and struggling to hold themselves together.

“I think nurses have excellent empathy. Generally we can feel somebody’s emotions, and we are compassionate because we are driven to help – but we are not sympathetic!” she says. “Sympathy being the bit where you understand why people feel the way they do about something … but we still care.”

Since turning professional, Carroll has moved away from intensive-care nursing, which requires a full-time commitment, to nursing practice and learning. She moved into the nursing pool, which took her to all parts of the hospital, but went back to work during the lockdown which shut venues everywhere.

“I took a (nursing) contract hoping that COVID would go away – of course – and that live entertainment would come back,” she says. “And it did. In Adelaide I think we are the only state that hasn’t skipped a festival … I love Nicola (Spurrier, Chief Public Health Officer for SA Health). I want to be Nicola. I adore that woman.”

This year she has done the Adelaide Fringe and the Melbourne Comedy Festival, and on the national tour she performs and talks about Off the Charts, which was written during COVID but isn’t about the pandemic. It’s more an amusing celebration of the crazy lives of nurses and health workers who play such an intimate role in their patient’s lives.

“I knew I had a book in me, but I didn’t have one in me last year, it’s quite bizarre,” she says. “I thought ‘I’ve written six or seven one-hour shows about hospital stories, why would I not put that in a book?’ It would be stupid not to.”

Georgie Carroll at the Dunstan Playhouse, May 7, bookings through BASS. Off the Charts by Georgie Carroll (Macmillan Australia, $16.99).