A stand-up tour where the comics don’t have to stand up

When Madeleine Stewart brought her revue to the Sydney Comedy Festival last year, she used a distinctive promotional come-on: “Sick of the same old comedians telling the same old dick jokes?”

Note that the slogan didn’t rule out the possibility of “dick jokes” per se. Rather, the target was “the same old” dick jokes, a subtle but important distinction.

“The audience is noticing I’m missing something that a lot of girls have”: Madeleine Stewart.Credit: Kate Geraghty

Her new version of that show, a half-dozen comedians touring Australia now under the name Are You Pulling My Leg?, gives audiences a look into the psyches of a selection of talented performers with a unique take on life that amuses, educates and delivers some decidedly new dick jokes.

Take Stewart herself, who conceived, curates and hosts the show. She was born missing a hand. Besides being a comedian, she’s an activist on disability issues.

In her set Stewart shows off her attenuated left arm proudly. “The audience is noticing I’m missing something that a lot of girls have,” she observes. A pause. “Tits!”

“I love my arm,” she says, holding it out. “It reminds me of E.T.’s penis.”

Lines like that are the hallmarks of the world the show creates, a carefree place where people facing some unusual challenges in life find community and share experiences, with rude laughs along the way.

At a recent Are You Pulling My Leg? stop in the Blue Mountains, performers included Jamal Abdul, who made light of his Italian-Palestinian background and his blindness, including the challenges of going on a “blind date”.

He told the audience that he thinks it’s prejudiced that the Australian government says he can’t drive. “I live in Bankstown,” he says, to laughs from the audience.

Another was Tom Elphick, who walks with a halting limp after being severely injured diving into a wave at a beach. He riffed on dating as well: “What I thought would be a major turn off, my limp, turned out to be a major turn on. Finally, a guy who couldn’t get away!”

‘I saw someone with a disability have agency and control and power … even as a 16-year-old, I thought, I want a bit of that attention.’

Disabled comedian Madeiline Stewart on the first time she saw Adam Hills

The show closed with an ambitious comic reminiscence by Sam Kissajukian, who talked about being bipolar. An enthusiastic audience laughed and applauded them all.

Stewart grew up in Campbelltown. At 16 she saw a show by Adam Hills, the comedian and TV host known for making jokes about missing a foot.

“He was born that way, same as me,” Stewart notes. “For the first time I saw someone with a disability have agency and control and power, and people admiring him. Even as a 16-year-old, I thought, I want a bit of that attention.”

Stewart immediately tried it herself and soon found herself working on her jokes in local clubs. “I was so young I wasn’t allowed into any of the clubs I was working in,” she recalls. “A friend would have to come down and vouch for me with the bouncer. A different time. It was very positive.”

“People come out of the woodwork after the show. They say, ‘It’s so cathartic to hear you talk about it’”: Sam Kissajukian.Credit: Wolter Peeters

She conceived the tour after hosting a local club comedy night dubbed Crips & Creeps. That morphed into the idea of a comedy revue of performers with one disability or another, which was a hit at the Sydney Comedy Festival last year.

With help from Arts on Tour, a NSW government-funded group that helps diverse artists connect with artists across Australia, she put together a touring model for the show, which is about halfway through 11 shows this year. The group plays the Bondi Pavilion on August 7.

Each performer decides on their own how much or how little to focus on their personal life story. But Kissajukian, in particular, credits Stewart’s encouragement for a turning point in his life.

He grew up in Adelaide and in his younger years, he says, he had tried to learn comedy in New York City, only to have it run aground: “None of my stand-up from Australia worked.”

Then came a mental breakdown, which he describes in his set. In 2021 he had a manic episode that lasted five months; he isolated himself and started painting obsessively. He emerged diagnosed with a bipolar disorder, but also the germ of an idea.

Kissajukian now has a performance and art show, 300 Paintings, in honour of what he produced during his episode, that will take him to Scotland for a month of shows at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

“Madeleine was the facilitator and spark of my coming back to the performing world,” he says of Stewart. “It changed my life, for her to find me and make the effort when I really wasn’t in a good place to share this stuff. She nurtured me to have that conversation.”

Both Stewart and Kissajukian say audiences have been receptive. “People come out of the woodwork after the show,” Kissajukian says. “They say, “It’s so cathartic to hear you talk about it.’”

The feedback gives the comedians in Are You Pulling My Leg? licence to talk about everything, up to and including sex, in which Stewart finds a note of common humanity: “I think I have sex the same way as everyone else: Drunk, and in the dark!”