Comedian Anne Edmonds: Self-doubt, humiliation and why it’s OK to fail

She’s had a great few years and a runaway hit at last year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival, but comedian Anne Edmonds is still struck by the demons of doubt.

Comedian Anne Edmonds

Beware: Anne Edmonds has switched modes. Enough with the “it’s not you, it’s me” routine.

For the aggressively titled What’s Wrong With You? - her eighth festival show - she decided she’d had enough of dissecting her own issues, ad nauseam.

“Of course, there’s still a lot wrong with me,” Edmonds quips, “but now I’m having a look around and thinking perhaps there’s something wrong with a few other people in the community.”

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Intriguing. Such as?

“I’m thinking about people’s obsession with themselves and the way everybody thinks they’re right,” she says.

“There is this righteousness around at the moment on both sides of the fence, this lack of ability to debate.

“It’s this ‘me’ culture, as well. It’s like, ‘I’m doing this, everyone! Move out of the way!’ (The show) has examples of that.

“It’s a little bit of an investigation, with little bitsies of character comedy.”

It’s a return to stand-up for Edmonds after she hit pay dirt in 2018 with her hit one-woman show Helen Bidou: Enter the Spinnaker Lounge last year.

Familiar to fans of the ABC morning-TV satire Get Krackin!, Helen Bidou is the best-known of Edmonds’ suite of characters; a collision of fashion diva, soused socialite and infotainment lush all compressed into one garish, glorious mess.

Critics fell over themselves in praise of Spinnaker, which packed late-night houses.

Anne Edmonds as Helen Bidou in her 2018 Melbourne comedy festival smash hit, Enter The Spinnaker Lounge.

For Edmonds the show was a watershed in her evolution as a character comedian following the success of The Edge of the Bush, the dark, five-part ABC micro-series (12 minutes per episode) she created and wrote that brought a slew of her characters together in one story.

Edmonds’ journey into the comedy forest began in 2008 in Darwin when her online satirical video skit called Raylene the Racist popped many eyeballs.

It was “like a lightning bolt moment”, Edmonds says, recalling how “the biggest penny drop of all time” inspired her to return to Melbourne where she got into open mic nights and did “what I felt I needed to do to legitimise myself”.

With spots on Have You Been Paying Attention? and Hughesy: We Have A Problem, Edmonds stresses that while she’s now established herself she still enjoys the enthralling grind of trial and error comedy demands.

“Failure is obviously the key to comedy,” Edmonds says passionately.

“You have to learn how to fail, over and over and over, to go through the humiliation and the tears and then be able to say, ‘No, I’m going back out there to do it’. It’s the only way.”

Self-doubt has never left her.

“I had a gig the other night with material I’d been doing for a while that seems to have been working,” she says.

The reaction?

“Nothing. I’m like, ‘hello? Is anyone there?’ And I came home that night and thought, ‘Nothing I’ve got for this festival is funny. I’ve lost it’. All these insecurities come dribbling in.”

So what pulls her through?

“It’s almost a numbers game for me now,” she says, referring to her runs on the board, which include “best show” Barry award nominations for each of the past three years.

“(When I bomb now) I can go, ‘Come on, there’s been 10 years where you haven’t bombed, you’ve had a couple of award nominations’...”

She breaks up laughing: “I literally have to use logic like that to go ‘no, you’re alright’.”

And, she adds emphatically, “the more you play to various audiences the more you start to work out ‘this wasn’t the audience for me’.”

Does she have an “Anne Edmonds” audience in mind?

“Sometimes I do and then realise I’m being a massive snob.

Ask a lot of comedians who they think their audience is they’ll be, like, ‘yeah, it’s, like, inner-city intelligent people’.”

Not so for Edmonds.

“I’d been going on about baby boomers, then I went into the fruit shop and a woman in her 60s came up to me and said ‘thanks for the joy’. I nearly died!

“But that’s my audience as much as cool kids in the inner-city comedy rooms.”

OUR REVIEW OF ANNE EDMONDS, WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?

Rating: ★★★½

Reviewer: Jim Schembri

We’re only a few seconds in and Anne Edmonds already has her 300-strong audience on side as she lashes out with gleeful gusto against her favourite irritations.

Strutting the stage with snarky physicality and good-natured fury, Edmonds proves herself a ripper storyteller, framing the show with her formative encounter with Frank, a 4WD driver and devout road rager.

A self-loathing leftie and old-school feminist, Edmonds dabbles in some hot-button commentary about hyper-sensitive woke women, new-age mums, the phrase “you do you” and the fantasy of marriage.

All very funny, aided no end by the wonderful growl Edmonds possesses.

The clear highlight involves a businesswoman ordering waffles and the subsequent detailing of the four stages of choking, a topic Edmonds has clearly given plenty of thought.

There are some clumsy spots: her rant about new-wave feminism screams to be developed, as does her awkward Catholics v Muslims bit, the only real stumble in an otherwise sure-footed set.

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STAY TUNED FOR OUR REVIEWS ON THE HOTTEST SHOWS AT THIS YEAR’S COMEDY FESTIVAL.

Anne Edmonds, What’s Wrong With You? until 21 April, Melbourne Town Hall.