Seeing a humpback whale puts comedy into perspective!

The final instalment of Chortle Student Comedy Award Caitriona Dowden's Australian comedy diary

Caitriona Dowden won last year’s Chortle Student Comedy Award – and her prize was to tour down under, largely courtesy of the Comedy Lounge in Perth, who covered the air fare. She has just returned from that trip, and here is her tour diary, starting with Perth, which we published yesterday, and then Melbourne, below...

Perth

Australia isn’t a place I’d ever especially intended to go. I’d pictured an impossibly long journey, unbearable heat, and hostile wildlife.

However, the opportunity to perform in some of the country’s best comedy clubs outweighed my fear of snakes – which is how I found myself on an 18-hour flight to the Southern Hemisphere.

The first leg of the tour was hosted by Perth Comedy Lounge in Western Australia. I had been warned about the bad weather, since May is the beginning of winter in Australia, but I found myself shedding layers in the 21C heat while the residents of Perth sported woolly hats and scarves.

My first gig was on Thursday evening, the day after I’d landed, and I arrived at the club catastrophically jet-lagged. I had spent the afternoon practising my ten-minute set, cutting out references that wouldn’t translate to Australian audiences, and trying not to take a nap.

But I was greeted in the green room with the revelation that Thursday night at Comedy Lounge is the gong show. If you’re not familiar with the format, a gong show is like a regular mixed-bill comedy night, except that the audience can make you leave the stage if you do something they don’t like, such as telling bad jokes or being a woman. Once enough audience members have held up their cards, a gong is sounded to signal the end of your set.

I had never done one before because, quirkily, I prefer audiences who want to listen to my jokes. But I decided to take this new challenge in my stride, and I set about organising three minutes of gong-friendly material. I would need to do my most accessible jokes – high laugh count and as relatable as possible.

I went with my failsafe opener – a monologue on the lactation miracles of St. Christina the Astonishing. Christina famously resurrected from the dead, but she couldn’t protect me from the whims of the audience, who gonged me off within seconds.

The advantage of doing your first ever gong show without warning after an 18-hour flight is that the only way to go is up. Fleeing from the scene of my own death, I went straight from Comedy Lounge to Leederville Comedy Club, where the audience were a lot warmer.

I returned to Comedy Lounge the next day for the weekend shows. They were MCed by Rove McManus, described to me as the Australian Graham Norton, and headlined by Janelle Koenig.

In the green room, the other acts shared their insider perspectives on the Perth comedy scene, and reassured me that I was very unlikely to encounter snakes in the winter. I knew embarrassingly little about Australian geography prior to the trip, and was surprised by the divide between Western Australia and the east coast.

One promoter described Western Australia as ‘basically the equivalent of Devon’ in terms of its politics and isolation from the rest of the country. Some of the comics in Perth poked fun at Melbourne for being ‘liberal’ and ‘woke’.

I hoped that they were right, since Melbourne would be my next stop….

Melbourne

Melbourne’s winter was more convincing than Perth’s. I arrived in the midst of a rainstorm, and ducked into one of the countless shops advertising ‘UMBRELLAS INSIDE’ to other naïve tourists who had failed to pack anything waterproof. I’d also neglected to bring anything warmer than a thin jacket, overlooking Victoria’s proximity to Antarctica and its winds.

For this leg of the tour, I was staying shared dorm in a backpackers’ hostel near Flinders Street Station. I spent my first evening sheltering from the rain, huddled in my bunk and reminiscing about the luxury of the Hotel Ibis in Perth. I woke up at one point to the bunkbed shaking wildly, and tutted to myself about the disrespect of my roommates. I woke up the next morning to a notification on my phone informing me that there had been a small earthquake overnight.

I was pleased to find that the Melbourne comedy scene lived up to everything I’d heard about it in Perth – diverse line-ups and comedy savvy audiences, who were generally a lot more receptive to jokes about medieval nuns. My first gig was Local Laughs, a night in the suburb of St. Kilda that has been run by Janet McLeod (known as the fairy godmother of Melbourne comedy) for 20 years. The show was MCedd by Luka Muller and headlined by Anna Piper Scott. The following night I performed at Luka’s own gig, Catfish Comedy in Fitzroy.

The desire to avoid my hostel bunk motivated me to get over the jetlag and go out sightseeing during the day. I visited the city’s art galleries and museums, and rode the free tram around the Central Business District. The existence of affordable public transport in Australia was the biggest culture shock of the trip, and, giddy with the novelty of it, I began to think that privatisation might actually be a bad thing.

I realised that, having dreaded the wildlife in Australia, I still hadn’t seen much of it (although I had spent a lot of time admiring the majestic white birds which I later learned were bin chickens). I visited the entomology gallery at Melbourne Museum to familiarise myself with local venomous spiders whilst they were safely behind glass, and then booked myself onto a bus tour of the Great Ocean Road which promised to take us into the bush.

Caitriona Great Ocean Road

The bus tour was the non-comedic highlight of the trip. We saw koalas in the trees, and kangaroos on a golf course. I didn’t encounter any snakes, but the yellow signs warning me that they might be lurking in the undergrowth satisfied my thirst for adventure.

From Thursday to Saturday, I performed at Melbourne Comedy Republic, below, a relatively new venue in the centre of the city. The line-ups were brilliant, the audiences warm, and the free drinks tickets plentiful. I was sad to leave, but I headed to the airport on Sunday morning feeling like an intrepid traveller, having survived a 3.8 magnitude earthquake, the suggestion of snakes, and the hostel’s communal kitchen.

Caitriona at Comedy Republic

Sydney

The next and final stop on the tour was Sydney. My preconceptions of the city had been coloured by Melburnians, who described it as ‘beautiful but soulless’, or just ‘beautiful’, but in a tone of voice which made it clear that it was not meant as a compliment.

I wasn’t sure about soulless, but it was definitely sprawling. I found myself constantly navigating buses, trains and light rail to get around. Fortunately, the novelty of affordable public transport hadn’t worn off, and I was also met with the fresh excitement of Sydney’s double-decker trains.

At this point in the trip, I was running out of sightseeing stamina. On my first day in the city, I caught the train to Circular Quay, framed by Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge. Nearby, I recognised the filming location for the 2010s Australian teen series Dance Academy’ and re-evaluated my impression of Sydney as lacking in culture compared with Melbourne.

From Tuesday to Saturday, I performed with Sydney Comedy Store, who put on shows across the city, as well as in their own venue. The shows had more or less the same line-up throughout the week, MC’d by David Smiedt and Sam Bowden, and headlined by Sean Woodland. We performed in the Factory Theatre to a small but enthusiastic audience, and at the Ritz Cinema the following night.

From Thursday to Saturday the shows were at The Comedy Store itself. It was definitely ‘club comedy’ (I’m never exactly sure what that term means as opposed to other kinds of comedy, but it seems to have something to do with how drunk the audiences are). My sets mostly went smoothly, and the room was playful and engaged, though there was often a background hum of glasses breaking and audience members discussing the punchlines among themselves.

I filled my days with more sightseeing, catching ferries across the harbour to Taronga Zoo and the suburb of Manly. I visited Bondi Beach, which I was warned by locals was overrated. I think that all beaches are overrated, but I was determined to get the full experience, so I perched on a towel, read a book, and dipped a perfunctory toe into the Pacific Ocean before calling it a day. To my horror, it was actually very relaxing, and I arrived at my gig that evening feeling far too at peace to perform stand-up comedy.

My stay coincided with whale season, when humpbacks migrate from Antarctica to warmer parts of the Pacific. On the Saturday - my final day in the city - I took a whale-watching cruise, and saw a humpback breaching (jumping out of the water) about twenty times.

As Sydney was the last stop on the tour, this was also my final night performing in Australia. There were two consecutive shows at Comedy Store that evening. The first was particularly good fun, and the second slightly anti-climactic. While I’d been hoping to end on a high, I did learn that it’s much easier to put a lukewarm audience response into perspective when you’ve seen a humpback whale breaching that morning - a lesson which I’m sure will come in handy for future UK gigs.

• This year’s Chortle Student Comedy Award Final will take place at Up The Creek in Greenwich on July 12, hosted by Mark Watson and featuring a set from Dowden. Click here for tickets

Here is her winning set from last year’s final: