Comedian Kitty Flanagan on her Logies F-bomb, finding the funny and why the world fell for Fisk

After bagging her third Logie Award, comedian Kitty Flanagan opens up how the world embraced Fisk – even if it nearly kills her – and what’s to come.

Despite having already won two awards in as many years, Kitty Flanagan’s Logies night was very different for her third silver statue this year – she was actually in the room this time.

In 2022, when she took home the Silver Logie for the Most Popular Actress for the title role in Fisk, the workplace comedy she’d created with her sister Penny, she was so certain she wouldn’t win that she wasn’t even watching the coverage at her Melbourne home when friend Sam Pang hilariously accepted it on her behalf.

And when she repeated the feat last year, she was busy with her stand-up comedy day job when Fisk co-star Julia Zemiro did the honours on her behalf. As fate would have it, she’d just put tickets on sale for a stand-up show in Hobart when this year’s nominations were announced – this time she was up for Best Actress in a Comedy for her role in Utopia – so she decided to postpone it quick smart.

“It would have been churlish not to turn up to the night three years in a row,” she says with a laugh.

Flanagan’s delight and genuine shock at winning the award for the “office bitch” role she’d been playing for five seasons was obvious, right down to the casual F-bomb she dropped during her snappy acceptance speech.

“I think I was probably the only person on the night who stuck to 30 seconds, so if I punctuate that with an F-bomb and still got off on time then I think all credit to me,” she says.

Kitty Flanagan with the Logie she won this year for Utopia. Picture:NewsWire/ Monique Harmer

Flanagan was doubly delighted that the men’s award in the comedy category went to her Utopia co-star and the show’s creator Rob Sitch, his first individual Logie. As she said in her speech, she learned how to make television by acting on Utopia and when she got the chance to do her own fast-paced workplace comedy in Fisk, not only did she use “their model of how they shoot and how they operate … I pretty much stole their entire crew as well”.

Among the valuable lessons she learned by watching the seasoned pros on Utopia, The Weekly and Full Frontal were how many mistakes could be fixed in the edit, and the pacing of comedy. When she and her sister first started producing scripts for Fisk, she was told time and time again that they were too long, but they held their nerve, knowing exactly how the crackling dialogue and rapid-fire jokes sounded in their heads.

“But had I not had the experience of getting a 50-page script on Utopia, I probably would have backed down and gone ‘Oh okay, they’re too long’ and then we would have ended up with 12-minute episodes of Fisk and wondering how we’re going to fill the void,” she says.

If Fisk was an unknown quantity for its first season – it took Flanagan years to get it made – the third season that hits the airwaves on Sunday night is anything but. After its first season was embraced by audiences around Australia, the second season charmed the world thanks to its being picked up by Netflix and other streaming platforms.

All of a sudden Flanagan was getting messages from foreign countries professing their love for the brown-suited probate lawyer Helen Tudor-Fisk and her law-firm colleagues including brother and sister duo Ray (Marty Sheargold) and Roz (Julia Zemiro) and Webmaster/probate clerk George (comedian of the hour Aaron Chen). Some came from countries such as Ireland and Canada that she expected would have “have a similar low-key sense of humour” but others were from places that surprised her such as India and the US.

Aaron Chen, Julia Zemiro, Kitty Flanagan and Marty Sheargold in Season 3 of Fisk.

“I get a lot of messages from Americans and all across the country, not just the little edgy bits in LA in New York,” she says. “So it’s an absolute thrill to know that our little show is going out in the States and people are watching it and enjoying it.”

Coming into season three – and knowing the world was watching – could have raised the stakes and the pressure but Flanagan says they reasoned that they shouldn’t try to fix something that wasn’t broken by trying to appeal to an audience they had never envisaged having in the first place.

“We wrote the characters based on people we know and things we’ve experienced,” she says. “And had we tried to accommodate an international audience by saying things like ‘Oh, maybe they won’t get that’ or ‘maybe we should change the language here’ … well, we just didn’t even think about it.

“I think the show remains quite true to itself and if people get it they get it, and if they don’t they don’t. Obviously people got it and we were as astonished as anybody that people in America got it.”

While the third season of Fisk will bring some new career challenges and opportunities for Fisk now that she has been made a partner of the firm (with the biro-altered business cards to prove it), two things absolutely won’t change. Firstly, there will be no deviation from the brown suits that were so hard to find for the first season and now seem to be everywhere, and even embraced by the likes of US presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

And secondly, there will be no love interest for the lead character.

Kitty Flanagan with her Utopia co-star Rob Stich, from whom she learned how to make television. Picture: ABC

“It comes up whenever we get short of story ideas and my sister goes ‘what about a love interest for Helen?’ and I go ‘absolutely not’ and I shut it down and we go no further with it,” Flanagan laughs. “It’s just always what happens and we want to write a show where the lead woman character is not solved by a partner.

“She has a perfectly happy life and she’s very content. She enjoys her work and her colleagues and her dad and her life is full. There was no need for it. But given that, if we get to season four and we can’t think of anything, we will roll out that love interest quick sticks.”

Flanagan describes the Fisk shoot with her co-stars and the who’s who of Australian showbiz queuing up for a guest spot as an absolute joy. But as creator, writer, sometime director and star it takes a toll too.

“It’s six very long weeks for me but I just love it. I don’t think I could do more than six weeks – I think I would end up in hospital – but the six-week shoot is just a joy.”

Then it’s back to the stand-up circuit, which has been the cornerstone of 30-year career and the barometer she uses to gauge all of her other comedy outlets.

Kitty Flanagan with sister Penny in 2007.

“If I want to say in comedy then I have to keep working live because there’s no point trying to write a script and tell people it’s funny if you’re not getting up there every night working in front of an audience that is telling me whether something is funny or not,” she says.

“It’s a really good barometer of where you are and really constructive and helps you back yourself. Because I need to be able to go into meetings when people say ‘I’m not sure about this joke’ and I can say ‘well I am, because I work every night in front of an audience and I can tell you it’s funny’. I need to have that confidence.”

Fisk, Sunday, 8pm, ABC

Originally published as Comedian Kitty Flanagan on her Logies F-bomb, finding the funny and why the world fell for Fisk