Serious funny business at Melbourne International Comedy Festival

MAKING a go of it at Melbourne’s comedy festival is no laughing matter.

WHEN you quit corporate law for stand-up comedy, you’re doing it for love, not money. Lucky that, as few performers walk away from Australia’s biggest comedy showcase flipping wads of cash.

A Cambridge graduate and recovering lawyer, Alice Fraser has just finished performing at the Adel­aide Fringe and is preparing for her second full run at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival this month.

She will present her third full-length show, Savage, and host the romance-themed game show Love Bites. On top of that are promotional spots, line-up shows, radio slots and podcasts. If that sounds like a lot of work, you haven’t heard the start of it.

Sydney-based Fraser, who hosts the podcast Tea With Alice, reels off what’s involved in being an independent comedy act in Australia’s biggest cultural festival.

Registration in the program costs $500. A small venue — comedians can book a festival-managed venue or find their own — may cost $100 to $300 a night.

Then there’s the technical aspects, front-of-house, and artwork for the program, posters, flyers and websites. Airfares and accommodation for a month have to be paid.

“And then usually you start writing,” Fraser says.

“Either you run in jokes in the clubs or you talk people into doing trials — usually there are 10 people in the room and you throw jokes at them to see if they work.”

But behind the laughter is a grim statistic: only half of the acts in the program break even — this year there are 559 of them — and there’s usually a day of reckoning for those who have paid their way to be there.

“I’m lucky that I’ve not yet lost money on a festival,” Fraser says.

“There’s usually a day in the middle of the run which is legendary, when people who are going to lose money realise they’re going to lose money, and it’s a pretty miserable day. And everyone who’s now confident that they’ll make money relaxes.”

Founded by Barry Humphries and Peter Cook in 1987, Melbourne International Comedy Festival is now the third biggest comedy festival in the world — after Edinburgh and Montreal’s Just For Laughs — and is the biggest cultural festival in Australia by box office.

Last year’s event sold almost 500,000 tickets, worth $13.5 million. Total attendance was more than 700,000, up almost 40 per cent since 2010, boosted by an expanding program of free events. It drew 23,500 visitors from interstate and 7300 from overseas. It is estimated to have generated a direct economic benefit of $7.8m additional expenditure in Victoria, according to Deloitte Access ­Economics.

A month of wall-to-wall shows by local and international artists is followed by a three-month roadshow around Australia and Asia. The festival also reaches out to the open-mic set with the RAW Comedy competition; to high school students with Class Clown (Josh Thomas, Tom Ballard and Joel Creasey are alumni); and to indigenous comedians with Deadly Funny and Deadly Funny Kids.

Susan Provan, the festival’s chief executive and curator for 15 years, sees no reason the festival can’t keep getting bigger.

“I take Edinburgh as my shining light,” she says.

“Edinburgh has a standing population of 750,000 people and they sell two million tickets. Melbourne has a population of more than four million people, so I figure we’ve got plenty of room to grow.”

The expansion has been aided by extra state funding of $4m across four years (recurrent funding is well under $1m a year), with cash tied to the free events, development of programs such as Deadly Funny, and to the yearly construction of pop-up venues. Sponsorship and TV — the festival will produce almost 10 hours of prime-time programming this year — also generate income.

The cost of bringing out international artists is covered entirely by their own box office, Provan says, although there is some cross-subsidisation as better-known com­edians help cover the cost of new discoveries.

It may surprise punters to learn how much of the money that ­sluices through the festival comes from the performers. Each local act is a self-funded enterprise, and comedians pay for the exposure the festival can give them.

“A lot of people lose a lot of money,” says Julie Lawless, a booking agent with More Comedy, which runs a festival show, Comedy Confessional.

“There’s this thing where open micers who, to be honest, I wouldn’t book for more than five minutes in one of my rooms, are doing an hour festival show, and they’re just doing that so they can say they’ve done the festival. It’s admirable, and they love it, and it’s great fun — but at the same time it will send you broke.”

She praises Provan for taking a risk and bringing to Melbourne international comedians who are not yet big names in Australia.

At the same time, Melbourne audiences are prepared to take a gamble on an unknown.

“Melbourne has got the best attitude to their festival,” Lawless says.

“It’s so embedded in their culture, as it’s been around for 30 years. I’m sure most people go and see someone they’ve heard of, like a Noel Fielding, and take a punt on someone they’ve never heard of, and that’s why it really works. Word of mouth is really strong as well. That’s why it’s one of the best in the world.”

Melbourne-based comedian Justin Hamilton, of podcasts The Shelf and Can You Take This Photo Please?, is a 20-year festival veteran. In that time, he says, the festival has become a little less lighthearted, or rather the participants have.

“In the mid-90s it was just fun performing for people and not expecting too much,” Hamilton says.

“We hoped we could make a living from it. But younger comedians now do see it as a viable career path: ‘I’ll do two years of the circuit, then I’ll do my solo show, then a show with this person, then I’ll end up on The Project, and then I’ll have my own TV show…’

“I’ve had conversations with young people who have career anxieties that we didn’t have till our 30s.

“It’s interesting to see them panicking at 26.”

Hamilton, who is performing his solo show Snacks in Melbourne, says a festival show is good discipline, allowing a comic to explore material and develop a persona in a way that club sets do not.

“It definitely hardens you up and it’s definitely worthwhile doing. You just have to be realistic why you’re doing it,” he says.

Fraser, too, says the festival can be an emotional and draining time for the performers, though some of the damage can be avoided. “I’m terribly careful, I tend not to stay out too late, I don’t go drinking with comedians, so I limit my exposure to some of the intense highs and lows of the festival because I’m a big nerd,” she says.

“But yes, there are plenty of doomed love affairs and people having complete breakdowns.”

Then there are the reviews.

In a sadly common experience for young female comedians, Fraser last year received a clumsy write-up that focused more on her appearance than her show, which was “incredibly frustrating”.

“You get so overwhelmed and excited when you hear a reviewer’s coming in.

“It may not be the case any more but the view is that a review can make or break a show. A bad one can certainly ruin your day or your week. Comedians are not very good at rejection.”

Provan says comedians from all over Australia do the festival every year “because it is such an important place to showcase their work, to be seen by the industry, by TV, radio, online, people who can make differences to careers”.

The atmosphere around Melbourne at comedy festival time, and the eagerness of audiences to see something new, is unlike anywhere except Edinburgh.

“People are happy to queue, to sit in a stuffy venue in an uncomfortable chair, because it’s that time of year,” Provan says.

“Because a lot of the focus is on new and emerging work alongside the famous people, it’s an opportunity to discover someone, follow them and later, when they’re in films and TV, say you were there at the beginning — you saw them in a 30-seat venue in Trades Hall.”

Melbourne International Comedy Festival, March 25 to April 19.