Maria Bamford reveals rule for audiences during Aussie stand-up tour
After a string of Australian comedy audience controversies, visiting US comic Maria Bamford has a deal for those heading to her shows.
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Maria Bamford returns to our shores for her first Australian tour in five years in July – and the comedian has a novel approach to the hot topic of unruly comedy audiences.
Twenty years since first introducing herself to Australian audiences with an award-winning debut at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Bamford is keenly aware that her style of comedy isn’t for everyone. A gifted impressionist with a keen eye for the absurdities of life, she also tackles some dark an uncomfortable topics.
Those who’ve followed her career have heard as Bamford details the ups and downs of a life lived with mental illnesses including eating disorders, bipolar II and obsessive compulsive disorder (also explored in her fantastic new memoir, Sure I’ll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness).
Ever the people pleaser, Bamford hates the idea of anyone stumbling into her show unaware only to find it’s not for them, she tells news.com.au.
“I just definitely recommend if you go to see a comedy show, YouTube it, Google it before you go out. Why put yourself through that pain and suffering?” she asks.
“My own family has led me astray. My parents brought me to see the Steven Spielberg movie Warhorse. Violent horse porn is what that is. It’s just miserable. I wish they hadn’t, but I sat through it because I love them and I hadn’t had anything to drink, so I did not heckle.”
“But I’m also about customer service. I will pay you to leave the show if you seem to be extremely uncomfortable. I carry cash on stage, and it will be American cash.
“I don’t know what the dollar’s worth. I’ve heard it’s strong right now, so you might win out in the end. It’s a limited amount of cash though, so you have to get in early.”
In recent weeks, fellow comedian Arj Barker made national headlines after he booted a woman with a crying baby out of his show. Days after that stoush, British comic Adam Kay’s sold-out Sydney show was derailed when a front-row punter simply refused to put their phone away for the whole show (a visibly upset Kay eventually ordered the audience member never to attend a live show again).
Bamford’s full of empathy when asked her thoughts on Barker’s recent controversy.
“The woman who brought the infant, I am sure she thought it was a fantastic idea. Maybe she thought, oh, this is the time where the baby always sleeps, and then the baby decided not to sleep. Anyways, we’re all doing the best we can … and sometimes it’s not very good.”
Surprisingly, Bamford says she even has a level of understanding to the habitual phone user who soured Kay’s show.
“I think it’s the human instinct – and phones don’t make it any easier – that yes, I want to do 17 things at once. I want to talk to you while potting, while learning Chinese. I would like to get a lot of stuff done in order to bring self-esteem up a little bit,” she says.
Bamford reveals that, with crowd management an unavoidable part of her job as a touring comedian, she’s even read up a little bit on bouncers’ secret techniques for calmly ejecting unruly people.
So far, she’s only had to carry it out once. Turfing out a heckler, Bamford style:
“You maintain a sense of calm, you make your body language peaceful and you say, ‘Would please hold my hands? Come, I have something to show you,’ … and then you lead them out of the show. I did that once to a woman my age who was off her t*ts.
She was like: ‘But where will I go?’ I know, where will you go?”
But Bamford says she welcomes the spontaneity and interaction that comes with live performance: “It’s the exciting part! We all come out to go, ‘what’s going to happen?’ People are coming to see me in a slow state of decay: ‘Is she going to make it through the show?’ It’s about connection, so I don’t think it’s always a bad thing that there’s interruptions.”
Outside of her stand-up, Bamford’s also been a prolific voice actor through her career, lending her vocal talents to shows like CatDog, Aventure Time and BoJack Horseman.
But in 2016 came a real breakthrough: Her very own live-action Netflix comedy series, Lady Dynamite, with Bamford playing herself in the lead role.
The show was a critical success across two seasons, but in her memoir, she confessed all had not been well behind the scenes. Before signing on for the show she’d made clear she would need some special allowances due to her health – tweaks like ample downtime between shooting days, and a place on set to rest when she needed it.
Despite receiving those assurances, it was a difficult shoot that, she wrote, often left her feeling she was letting people down whenever she needed to take care of herself.
Bamford doesn’t blame anyone in particular for that situation, but rather “the machine itself.”
“Every job would like you to work more. For me, I could only do 12-hour days and then I needed a 12-hour turnaround – which was actually a little bit less than what I needed, because I was exhausted the whole time. But that was a real issue and a real disappointment,” she says.
“But they did everything they could, and it was my dream to have a TV show. And so the hilarious part about it is … maybe I have no idea what’s going to make me happy?”
Touring the world as a stand-up comedian seems like it would involve similar triggers to her health – but Bamford, who makes a point of talking with transparency about her finances, says that at this point in her career, she’s figured out a sweet spot between working and looking after herself.
“Stand-up is perfect on some level. Financially I’m very good: Because of the Netflix series, I don’t have to work as much. If you want to hear the numbers, I need to earn $25,000 a month to keep the business going, to get everyone paid, including myself, and so any more work than that is unnecessary.
“So I’m trying to keep that in mind, because it isn’t necessarily true that working more or earning more is going to raise one’s level of contentedness.”
Maria Bamford is touring Australia in July:
Friday 5 July Odeon Theatre Hobart
Tuesday 9 July Hindley Street Music Hall Adelaide
Wednesday 10 July The Tivoli Brisbane
Friday 12 July Enmore Theatre Sydney
Saturday 13 July Palais Theatre Melbourne
Tuesday 16 July Astor Theatre Perth
Originally published as Maria Bamford reveals rule for audiences during Aussie stand-up tour
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