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Zoe Coombs Marr: ‘Stop doing it, straight people, you’re so weird’
Every comedian may walk a tightrope between being bathed in a balmy wave of laughter and being flattened by the cold rock face of eviscerating silence. But Zoe Coombs Marr does it while having to balance a seal, metaphorically, on her nose.
“I’d love to be able to just make jokes and be funny but I can’t,” she says, “because I’ve got like a whole community of people that I’m part of and representing, and I don’t want to get laughs onstage and then have someone beat me up because they hate queers, because I’ve contributed to that.”
Coombs Marr’s comedy not only pokes fun at stereotypes about lesbians but also playfully highlights how myopic straight people can be about their walk through the world. Her award-winning comedy, which has been a hit with gay and straight audiences – she’s opened for Nanette star Hannah Gadsby and Broad City co-creator Ilana Glazer and won everything from best show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival to most outstanding show at the Melbourne Comedy Festival – is born from that “tension”.
Comedian Zoe Coombs Marr at Bodhi Vegan.Credit: Edwina Pickles
“Straight women, you’re incredible, you’ve got all the same problems as normal women” – here she’ll pause onstage and say, “flipped it”, before giving a knowing wink – “but with the dating men thing”. Or of straight sex and how it “normalises” the idea to queer people that sex and babies are connected: “It’s crazy,” she’ll say, wide-eyed. ”Stop doing it, straight people. You’re so weird.”
In other words, she was the perfect person to co-host SBS’s coverage of the 43rd Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, which aired last weekend, alongside drag artist Courtney Act, comedian Joel Creasey and TV presenter Narelda Jacobs. (This was Coombs Marr’s third time co-hosting the coverage for SBS.)
Over lunch at Bodhi, a vegan restaurant in Sydney’s CBD, the comedian explains that her Spiderman-like ability to see what we don’t see – and gauge what she can and can’t get away with onstage – stems partly from growing up queer in the regional NSW town of Grafton, where she had to pay close attention to what was happening around her in order to remain safe amid bigotry.
Vegan yum cha: clockwise from top left, shiitake mushroom, asparagus and truffle oil dumpling, cream corn “chicken” dumpling (white bowls) pan-fried Peking duck dumpling, spinach dumpling (in bamboo basket), blanched fresh kalan vegetables, tofu pocket with satay sauce. Credit: Edwina Pickles
“I think for all of the disadvantages that come with being, like, oppressed or [having a] minority identity, is that you do see a lot more,” says Coombs Marr, 36, who staged a musical with her best friend at a local hall instead of going to schoolies week and who began doing stand-up at the age of 18.
Not everyone has always got her comedy. For all those who were left howling at her show Dave, in which she dressed in drag as a pony-tailed, misogynistic man who was unable to navigate the female anatomy – The Scotsman hailed her “unmatched” audacity when she performed it at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2016 – some took the parody at straight value. (Once, at a queer club, “these women started yelling at me: ‘There’s nothing wrong with women’s bodies!’” )
Coombs Marr doesn’t mind. “The way I approach all my work is that I go: ‘What’s the opposite of what I should do? What would destroy my career at this point?’ That’s certainly where Dave came from.”
This stems not only from her academic roots – she has a joint performance studies and fine arts degree from the University of NSW – but also from her frustration at her inability, in her early years of comedy, to get a five-minute spot at an open-mic night because those spots were usually filled by … Daves.
Since then Coombs Marr, who calls herself “just some dickhead who does fart jokes”, has not only built up a passionate, loyal following but also become something of an accidental activist.
Comedians Zoe Coombs Marr and Rhys Nicholson in 2016 in a protest about the lack of marriage equality at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.Credit: Penny Stephens
In 2016, in what was dubbed in the media as possibly “Melbourne’s first gay marriage”, Coombs Marr (who had a girlfriend), clad in a white bridal gown, and fellow comedian Rhys Nicholson (who had a boyfriend), clad in a white jacket , “married” each other on stage at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival Club. The point of the protest that took place a year before gay marriage became legal in Australia? Gay people could get married, just not to someone they happened to love. (Hannah Gadsby MC’d the ceremony, and the couple signed marriage papers that were never filed.)
A few people, wearing Australian flags as capes, chanted: “Lefty scum! Lefty scum!”
A year later, Coombs Marr wrote a moving column in The Sydney Morning Herald about how the marriage equality postal vote had plunged her back into the terrified isolation she sometimes felt while growing up.
“Because every queer grows up with a fear of rejection, and this vote/survey/mud-slinging match has managed to tap right into that. Here we are, back in the schoolyard, feeling worthless, fearing for our safety. I … am reminded of the ute of guys who’d follow me from school to my girlfriend’s, circling the block, yelling: “DYKE!”
She then proceeded in the column to make a joke.
“I’m so lucky. When I came out the worst thing was my dad saying, ‘Don’t paint yourself into a corner’. Which mostly I found upsetting because as a lesbian I would NEVER mess up a DIY project.”
’My dad said, ‘don’t paint yourself into a corner’. Which I found upsetting because as a lesbian I would NEVER mess up a DIY project.′
Zoe Coombs Marr on coming out
At the restaurant, between bites of spinach dumpling – and being interrupted every few minutes for the first hour as we’re offered additional plates of blanched vegetables, shiitake mushrooms and faux Peking duck – Coombs Marr reflects on that last point: “Always going for the gag,” she drawls.
Does it cost her anything, psychologically, to make jokes while reflecting on the persecution she’s suffered because of her sexual identity? (One joke of hers about being a lesbian: “I’m good at it, right? I will happily shut down a fun situation to correct someone on their pronoun usage”.)
“Well, it doesn’t cost me anything; if it did, I wouldn’t do it,” she says calmly, before smiling at a yum cha waitress who has offered us yet another dish and shaking her head, demurely. “Serious and funny exist right together and on top of each other”, and making jokes is “something of a coping mechanism”, she says. “Sometimes I think the most horrific things are the most absurd, and that’s why that’s where the best jokes and biggest laughs are. In the dark.”
‘I think the most horrific things are the most absurd and that’s why, that’s where the best jokes and biggest laughs are. In the dark.’
If anything, she says, facing rejection as a minority growing up had prepared her for a career in which the most brutal and public form of rejection is baked into its core.
“Well, you’re already used to it,” she says of growing up queer, looking straight into my eyes calmly. “And comedy is so much about shame and humiliation, so when you exist in a sort of state that is very close to those kind of embarrassing emotions all the time, you kind of become comfortable there. I mean, I feel very comfortable in discomfort, and I find that almost … I don’t know, like I’m drawn to it.”
Zoe Coombs Marr in her “Bossy Bottom” special on Amazon Prime.Credit: Amazon Prime Video
This could be why Coombs Marr doesn’t flinch when I ask her about the controversy that surrounded this year’s Mardi Gras: the push last year from within the community to ban NSW Police from participating in the parade. Sydney-based activist group Pride in Protest said the organisation should “return the parade to its protest roots” and it was inappropriate for the police to march given, it said, the “immense violence” that Indigenous people have suffered at the hands of the police, particularly those who identify as LGBTQIA+. (The Mardi Gras board voted against the motion.)
“There’s no secret that I am not a big fan of the police; their role in Mardi Gras is well documented historically,” she says, referring to the first Sydney Mardi Gras, in 1978, which was marked by police brutality, with 53 people arrested and beaten up by police. “So it is understandable that the community feels uncomfortable [with them] being there. That said, there are other members of the community for whom the presence of the police is a great thing.” She’s referring to the police being visible supporters of the queer community. “But I think this is in the context of [the] Black Lives Matter [movement], and so they [the police] should really be listening to black and brown voices about this issue.”
Though Coombs Marr says she wishes the event would return to its radical roots – “From where I’m standing, radical is always better! … I don’t go to the Mardi Gras to be like, ‘Yes, I can’t wait to see the Optus float!’” – she “loves” being at the event and the opportunity it gives her to represent “people like me” who don’t have the same platform in mainstream spaces and events.
The billCredit: Fairfax
This year’s theme was “Rise” – “a new dawn and a new day for all of us after a year of unprecedented challenge and hardship” – which parallels a first for the event: it didn’t march as it has always done up Oxford Street because of COVID-19, but instead was held at the Sydney Cricket Ground. Coombs Marr jokes that this move “feels like it’s been organised by my dad, as a ploy to get me interested in cricket”. But the fact of the matter is that Coombs Marr has continued to rise during the pandemic.
Although many of her live shows were cancelled last year because of the coronavirus, her comedy special Bossy Bottom had its premiere on Amazon Prime and she featured in a variety of online group comedy shows, including The Stan Original Australian Lockdown Comedy Festival alongside Tom Ballard, Dave Hughes and Claire Hooper, among others. She recently gave an online Master Class workshop in writing for comedy, for London’s Soho Theatre. And this month and nextshe will take her newest show, Agony! Misery!, to the Melbourne Comedy Festival.
What’s next?
“It would be pretty radical if I did a real right-wing show,” she says, before erupting into rolling laughter. “Why not? [Maybe I’m] just going to be an anti-vaxxer for fun.”
Bodhi Restaurant,
Cook + Phillip Park, 2 College St, City
Phone 9360 2523
Lunch, Monday to Saturday, 11am - 3pm, Sunday 11am - 4pm; Dinner, Tuesday to Saturday, 5 - 10pm