Australian comedians have traditionally provided British audiences with a slice of unabashed, earthy humour, dating back to the early heyday of Dame Edna Everage, 40 years ago. Now a fresh generation of comedians from Australia and New Zealand are lining up to provide a similar service. And this time they are real women.
This summer an influx of antipodean standup comedians, variety acts and sitcom stars are reshaping the way we view the two countries.
From cleverly confrontational comics, like the award-winning Australian Hannah Gadsby, to television shows such as Netflix’s The Letdown, which gleefully explodes the myths of motherhood, and BBC Three’s dating saga 600 Bottles of Wine, the bold and complex voice of the 21st-century antipodean female is being heard loud and clear on this side of the world.
And last month Netflix sealed a deal to show the New Zealand film The Breaker Upperers, already a runaway success at festivals. A black comedy, it tells of two women who offer to help women to “consciously uncouple” from unwanted partners. It was written by and stars Jackie van Beek and Madeleine Sami, and was made by Miss Conception, a New Zealand production company also run by two women, Ainsley Gardiner and Georgina Conder.
Coming to British audiences later this summer is the latest from New South Wales comedian Sarah Kendall: a new three-part show, Australian Trilogy Part II, going out on BBC Radio 4. Kendall, who now lives in Britain, welcomes the range of Australian comedy from female performers, but suspects it is driven by more than just an old urge to poke fun at English reserve.
“It is hard to unpick it. The festival treadmill has become a structured international circuit, so there is a lot of cross-fertilisation between comics from different countries now,” she said. “There is more of a sense we all understand each other.”
Tempting though it may be to stereotype the straightforwardness of the Australian psyche, once parodied in Private Eye’s Barry McKenzie comic strip, and assume it still offers an antidote to British social niceties, Kendall argues that female comics from Australia and New Zealand are simply contributing to a bigger worldwide feminist conversation.
“The international nature of the festival circuit means we are all travelling around much more and influencing each other. You really don’t need to explain you are Australian any longer,” said Kendall.
“It is not shouty Australian men versus the English gentleman comic, with his clever wordplay, any more. There is some truth to these old stereotypes, but these days most Australian comedians are much more experimental or surrealist. Even the men are not all the classic, shoot-from-the-hip, tell-it-like-it-is comics.”
In fact, changing social mores across the English-speaking world are at the core of this comedy. Gadsby, last year’s joint winner of the prestigious Edinburgh fringe comedy award, certainly offers a route through the minefield of misleading gender assumptions. The Tasmanian comic, who is a lesbian, has publicly toyed for a year now with the idea of leaving comedy for good because of unwelcome responses to her sexuality, even making this issue the centre of her recent hit HBO television special, Nanette.
Daniel Fienberg, a critic at the Hollywood Reporter, was one of many reviewers who judged the show really worthy of the word “special”. This weekend, positive reaction to Nanette has prompted Gadsby to think again about quitting: “If the show had gone as badly as I planned, it would have worked. But now, like, I’m left with the choice. I’ll either be an idiot or a hypocrite, and I’d rather be a hypocrite than an idiot,” she told the press on Friday.
The rise of the modern Australian female standup may date from the arrival of Julia Morris from Sydney at the Edinburgh fringe in the early 2000s. (Morris is now a mainstay of Australian television, co-hosting I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.)
But she has been followed by many others, including Brisbane’s Deborah Frances-White, whose acclaimed personal narratives, broadcast on Radio 4, told wittily of her attempt to track down her birth mother and father.
Prominent among a list of at least a dozen antipodean women who can now top a standup bill is Rose Matafeo, the comedian and television presenter from Auckland, New Zealand, who is performing at Edinburgh again next month. Part of what has been called “a Kiwi invasion”, Matafeo will attempt to repeat the success of her show from last year, Sassy Best Friend, while the Australian contingent at Edinburgh includes comic Felicity Ward and first-timers Laura Davis and Heidi Regan.
