The application windows for some festivals have already closed, meaning those taking part need to have written a blurb and nominated a title for their next touring show, a fiendish task given the works are often still embryonic.
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The sprawling festival season offers both immense opportunities and challenges for comedians and the work starts well before the opening night galas. Right now, the performers are developing their shows, road-testing bits at local comedy nights and arranging the logistics for what can be months of touring.
ArtsHub talks to four comedians, from newcomers to seasoned performers, to find out what they’ve learned from the festival experience and how they’re gearing up for their 2025 shows.
Geraldine Hickey
A beloved veteran of Australia’s comedy festival circuit, Geraldine Hickey was a RAW Comedy finalist back in 2001 and has won acclaim and a strong following with her warm and evocative storytelling style.
After some serious thinking, she’s chosen a one-word title for her upcoming show. “At times, it can be an absolute nightmare,” she says of the application process. “I’ve been really lucky; the past few years have been a continuation of the last show, whereas … this year, the day [the application] was due, my head went round and round trying to figure out whether I should make [the title] into a sentence. I haven’t had a one-word title for many years. I was like: ‘Is this completely off-brand for me?’ Oh my gosh, I went down such a rabbit hole in my mind.”
Read: Building a career in comedy
Hickey says collaborating with her regular director Rachel Davis is a key part of getting her shows in shape for the festival run. “We work well together in that she knows how to add structure and find the deeper meaning in things. She’s got the ability to step back and look at the bigger picture, and that makes it a lot easier to put the jigsaw puzzle together.”
Proving that’s there no one right way to construct a winning festival show, Hickey used to never write down any scripts. Now, she’s found that putting pen to paper can unlock new jokes. “I’m one of those late-diagnosis ADHD people, so now I’ve got medication to help me actually sit down and not be overwhelmed at the thought of having to write an hour of comedy,” she explains.
Hickey’s advice to comedians starting out on their festival journey is to avoid making comedy an all-consuming pursuit. At one point, she worked at a children’s after-school care centre and it proved a welcome reprieve from worrying about the business of performing live: “The kids don’t care about comedy, and also you couldn’t have your phone on you when you were working, so there was no doom-scrolling.”
These days, she has outside interests like taking photos for her bird calendars and bushwalking to give her balance. “Having something else to look forward to is very helpful,” she says.
Anisa Nandaula
As she prepares for her first full festival season, Ugandan-Australian comic Anisa Nandaula has developed a brutal but efficient system to determine which jokes will make the cut for her show. She records each short club spot she does and uses the audience reaction to give every joke a rating of either ‘BL’ (big laugh), ‘ML’ (medium laugh) or ‘SL’ (small laugh). Once a joke has racked up a few ‘SL’ ratings, she cuts it from her repertoire, while she’ll retool jokes with a few ‘ML’ ratings to turn them into reliable laugh-getters.
Nandaula, who first came to prominence as a slam poet, has already amassed more than 200,000 online followers with her short comic videos, often focusing on her day-to-day life in Brisbane. She namechecks Australian comics Luke Kidgell and Neel Kolhatkar as ‘the pioneers’ of cultivating a fanbase through social media.
Also an admirer of stand-ups like Sam Kinison and Wanda Sykes, Nandaula plans to collect all her best bits to date in her first show rather than necessarily trying to tell an overarching story. “Personally, I love watching hours of people’s best hitters, even though they may not be cohesive. I think that will be great for my fans to come and see.”
The 26-year-old says she’s “incredibly lucky” to have management who can take care of the logistics of booking a festival run. “I’m able to focus on the creative process,” she explains. “All that other stuff is so hard; if I had to do all that, I think my brain would explode. It’s so scary, but I’m excited. I think it’s going to be so much fun.”
Harry Jun
“Every season, you see someone who has just nailed it with their show title and the graphics,” Sydney comic Harry Jun says. “You kind of wonder: how the f*** did they do that?”
Jun – a rising Korean-Australian comedian who has also worked as a host and cartoonist – has taken his shows I Grew Here and Watermelon Licking around Australia’s festival circuit and to Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Next year, he’s planning on bringing his new hour to Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney.
So, how does Jun know when he has finished writing and rewriting and his show is ready to tour? “I think that’s really hard, but I have a friend who says you shoot the arrow and then paint the target around it. You’re never done, really, never finished. But if you set yourself a deadline of 55 minutes of comedy, by every March, you can work towards it.”
Last year, Jun tweaked his show during the Melbourne dates after he was inspired by seeing shows by Furiozo and Lara Ricote – both comics who incorporate elements of clowning into their work – and realised he could add some more playful interaction into his hour.
Ahead of his 2025 shows, Jun did some split shows at the Sydney Fringe Festival to develop his new material. “That was a good thing, because I did it with my mate Jamal [Abdul]. I love his comedy, and it’s a double advantage because we get to share the stage time, and we can give each other notes.”
Across his time on the festival circuit, Jun has learned it’s easy – but ultimately counterproductive – to get distracted by ticket sales and award nominations. “If you’re in it for the long term, you can’t focus on that sort of stuff. You have to think: ‘How can I be the funniest I can be this year?’ The best thing happened to me recently, I was looking back and thinking: ‘Oh, look, I didn’t win awards, and maybe I could have sold more tickets, but I’m really proud of how hard I worked this year and hopefully I can do even better next year’.”
Chris Ryan
When Chris Ryan speaks to ArtsHub, it’s the last day for comedians to send their applications for festival season, and she’s putting the finishing touches on the title and blurb for next year’s show.
“There’s something funny about the forced deadline to have a new hour each year,” she says. “Comedians are just looking around for something to build the show around, and anything that happens can become bigger than it is. I bought some second-hand pencils named after Bruce Lee, and I thought: ‘I’m going to call my show Bruce Lee Pencils!’ and I found lots of segues, but I’ve abandoned that idea.”
Early next year, Ryan will trial some new material in Future Classics, a split show with comedian friend Luke Heggie. After those work-in-progress shows, and up until the eve of festival season, she’ll continue refining her show, eventually writing it down word for word – her scripts usually come in at 8000 to 10,000 words. Yet she says it’s not until much later that she gets a complete perspective on her work.
“I was talking to the brilliant Annie Boyle the other day about how it’s not until you’ve done the show about 50 times that you can look back and know what the show is about. The way I do it, I’m way too close to the material to have the big picture, you know?”
Ryan, who won the Sydney Comedy Festival Best Newcomer back in 2019, says she still finds the lead-up to festival season intense. “I enjoy doing [my show] for the first time because you’re like, ‘Oh my god, I’m finally here!’ But it is scary as hell. I tend to dissociate a bit before and go into lizard mode. I don’t say much, don’t see many people. I always thought I was really calm when that was happening, but now, I think it’s a heightened state of anxiety.”
Her advice to anyone approaching their first festival run is not to put pressure on comedy to be their income. “Make sure you let it just be your art, or you’ll start to resent comedy, and it won’t be the right vibe. You want to feel joy about a creative pursuit.
“The fact is a lot of people go to festivals and lose money. You have to be prepared for that, and not be angry about it. I mean, I say that, but I get angry all the time.”
