How famously conflict-averse Luke McGregor handles curly questions

Luke McGregor is so conflict-avoidant he once gave a perfect rating to an Uber driver who crashed while he was in the car.

“They pulled over and they did the exchange of information, and I just got out and walked the rest of the way,” he says. “I still gave him five stars.”

Luke McGregor at Lucia restaurant, South Melbourne.Credit: Penny Stephens

The everyman comedian has made a career of awkwardness and has a joke in his show that it’s lucky his wife was someone he wanted to marry, because when they proposed he would have said yes no matter what, in order to avoid a conflict. But he says becoming a father – he has two tween stepchildren and a new baby – has made him able to cope with more.

“I saw a psychologist a little while ago, and I was just like, ‘do you have to solve all your own mental problems before you are allowed to help solve our questions?’” The psychologist told him that although they had tools, they did not have to have it all figured out – which was a great relief when he found he had to put on a less anxious face in front of his children.

“I’m just telling them things like, if someone calls you that, just let it wash off you and don’t worry about it. Whereas, if that was me, I’d be like, ‘how dare you!’ I’d think about it for years.”

This will not be a surprise to fans who have followed McGregor’s career from his early stand-up days through Utopia, Rosehaven (created with fellow comedian and best friend Celia Pacquola), his six-part comedy-documentary Luke Warm Sex and numerous appearances on shows like Talkin’ ’Bout Your Generation, Spicks and Specks and Taskmaster Australia. He has made a career out of that awkwardness, with observational jokes punctuated by his trademark short bark of a laugh.

Squid ink pasta with calamari, prawns and lobster bisque at Lucia.Credit: Penny Stephens

After years in the Melbourne comedy scene he’s moved to Newcastle with his wife, Dr Amy Thunig, an academic at the University of Technology Sydney. But the Taswegian is back in Melbourne for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, where he has a show for the first time in eight years. His publicist had suggested we meet for lunch at hatted South Melbourne fine diner Lucia, which serves a seasonal modern Australian menu. He confesses he had not heard of the place and has walked 40 minutes in the heat from rehearsing for Wednesday night’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival Gala. Rather than request somewhere closer, he said yes to Lucia – which turns out to be a fantastic choice, with attentive care in both service and food.

McGregor decides on a lobster “taco” to start, which is dressed in lemongrass and tequila and served in a thin, taco-shaped round of jicama, a South American root vegetable sort of like a turnip. I can’t pass up a few oysters with cucumber and jalapeño granita. For the main, he decides on the wagyu steak special while I go the squid ink pasta with prawns and calamari. The steak turns out to be a generous portion of thinly sliced, perfectly buttery and gorgeously marbled meat, and McGregor insists I take a few slices – though to be fair, he does not have to insist very hard.

He generally has a rule that I think is eminently sensible – if there is a peanut butter dessert on a menu, you should order it – but since he’s going to be on stage in a few hours, we wistfully forgo dessert on this occasion.

Although he performed at the Gala in 2023, McGregor hasn’t done a full-length show in eight years. In 2017, he was single, living in Melbourne and riddled with anxiety. For his new show, he’s married, living in Newcastle, and well, still anxious but better at covering it.

Wagyu steak with fries and Parisian butter at LuciaCredit: Penny Stephens

“It’s pretty much about everything that’s happened in the last eight years, but I used to do a show where I’d talk about how I’m anxious and nervous, and now I’m still that, but I’ve also got children, right? And so children are like, ‘how do you solve this issue?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know. I haven’t figured out myself yet’. So you have to fake it or make something up.”

You might think someone with McGregor’s disposition might have chosen a career further from the spotlight, like an economist or something. He thought that, too, getting a degree in economics and planning a life as a policy wonk, until a drink too many at a comedy gig changed his life.

Cheque please: The bill at Lucia restaurant.Credit:

“One of my friends was doing comedy, one of my housemates, and I went to the gig to watch him, and someone didn’t show up. I was a bit tipsy, so I got up as well. I loved it and just never stopped doing it,” he says. He had prepared nothing, so he was addressing a room full of strangers entirely off the cuff. Did it go well? He shakes his head, very sure on this point. “No.”

“For the first minute and a half, I was just saying things like, you guys might want to put down your drinks because you are going to spill them all over yourself, I’m very funny, and the crowd went with it. Then I had no jokes and I bombed. But the little bit that went well was enough to get me hooked.”

It took a long time to make it his full-time career, but he knew right then that this was what he wanted to do with his life. “In that moment, that was the first time where I felt like coming home or something. It felt like, ‘oh, this is me. This feels like unfiltered. This feels like 100 per cent me’.”

The early years were hard, playing to tiny rooms and doing his own flyering. “I used to do a double act with a friend from Tassie, and we’d have, like, two people there. And then when I did Edinburgh, I had, like, four people, seven people, in an 80-seater venue,” he says. But those two, four or seven people liked what they saw. He won the coveted Best Newcomer Award for his first full-length show at MICF in 2013, and he started playing to bigger rooms. “I was moving to bigger venues, quicker than I was ready. At first, I was worried no one would show up, and then I was worried people would show up.”

Luke McGregor on stage at the 2017 Melbourne International Comedy Festival Gala.Credit: Jim Lee

He landed the role of Hugh on the first two seasons of Utopia, where he became close with Pacquola. Their show Rosehaven turned out to be a hit for the ABC and ran for five seasons, by which time “we had run out of real estate storylines”, McGregor says. “We always had enough ideas for one-and-a-half seasons, and by the time we got to the fifth, we were on the cusp of running out of ideas. And then we just didn’t have enough for a sixth. It would have been a strain and would have been the first time we went into writing without having a full idea in our heads.”

That’s not to say McGregor’s collaboration with Pacquola is finished, with the pair working on a new project he’s cagey about telling me too much about. “We want to write something where more things can happen,” he says, somewhat mysteriously. “Rosehaven was very small stakes... I reckon we’ll work together on stuff forever, we’re always doing something. And plus, we’re besties, we’re hanging out anyway.”

The lobster “taco” at Lucia.Credit: Penny Stephens

He nominates Pacquola, of course, as one of his favourite comedians, alongside Ronny Chieng, Aaron Chen, Sam Campbell, Nazeem Hussain and Anne Edmonds. I had read an interview with McGregor a decade ago where he revealed his comedic hero was American Dave Chappelle, so I ask him: how does famously conflict-averse McGregor now feel about Chappelle, who came under fire for jokes about transgender people in his 2021 Netflix special The Closer, then doubled down in his 2023 special The Dreamer? McGregor’s wife is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns.

It has been an extremely pleasant interview thus far, but it is clear McGregor does not like this question. He pauses to consider his answer. “I don’t gel as much with his new stuff,” he says, slowly. “I haven’t kept up with him. So I don’t know. I know there was controversy around his last special, but I haven’t kept up to date.”

I press the matter. Are there jokes or topics or subjects comics just shouldn’t touch? “I’m a straight, white man, so I have all the privilege, and I don’t like commenting on people who aren’t other straight, white men. I just don’t feel like it’s my place to say,” he says. But he goes on: “I think trans rights are really important. I think we have got to protect those, and I don’t like what’s happening in America right now. I think if comedy doesn’t elevate groups that need help or that are getting persecuted in some way, then what are we doing?”

Celia Pacquola and Luke McGregor write and star in Rosehaven.Credit: ABC

He says while he loves watching comedians like Jon Stewart and John Oliver overseas, and Tom Ballard here, that kind of comedy is not his chosen medium for standup. But he then quotes American YouTuber Philip DeFranco: “You may not F-word with politics, but politics F-words with you” (this is an exact transcript, McGregor is no foul-mouthed comedian). “We’ve all got skin in the game,” he says.

For McGregor, that skin in the game has to result in a shared empathy and compassion. “I think part of our job as good citizens is that we have to think about issues that don’t affect us, like aged care, like trans rights, like childcare. You might not be affected by it, but without people thinking about it outside of their own experience, those issues don’t get fixed.”

In full flow, he explains the duty a government has to its citizens, and that we have to each other. And even though we are talking politics, which can be tricky ground for a comedian or public figure of any kind, he does not seem nervous at all.

Luke McGregor’s show Okay, Wow runs at the Comedy Theatre, Melbourne, March 27-April 6, and at the Comedy Store, Sydney, May 3 and Concourse Lounge, Sydney, May 4.

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