As festival starts to wind up and punters return to their warm lounge rooms, hundreds of weary, heavy-livered comedians begin to contemplate what it is going to be like going back to their mundane, eleven-months-a-year, everyday-person existence.
For most of us, comedy is an amateur hobby. Something we hope to get better at, but as yet, must keep to weeknights and the occasional weekend gig. So for us, comedy festival offers the opportunity, one month a year, to be a ‘comedian’. A real life live-it-breath-it comedian. We get to write shows, invest money we don’t have, flier people who are not interested, perform every night (if we’re fortunate enough to get an audience), meet interstate and international comedians, drink until the wee hours and wake up on our doorstep at 8am the next day having gotten home in quite a state only to realise we’ve lost our keys.*
Sure, we do this occasionally during the year too, but during festival, it becomes a full-time job.
Festival gives starting comedians, experienced comedians and the comedians somewhere between the two a chance to get in the thick of it and experience every aspect of what the lifestyle could entail, if we ever became one of the ‘chosen few’ who could make a living from it.
At the end of a festival, I always think the same thing: HOW do people who make a living from being a comedian, live this lifestyle all year? Sure, a lot of comics probably don’t ‘rock ‘n roll’ it all year, but surely, if you’re spending considerable time travelling the country (or the world) and your job consists of gigging in a bar every night and meeting new people all the time, it would be difficult not to abuse your liver religiously.
To be entirely honest, I couldn’t do it. And so, one month a year, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival gives me the opportunity to indulge in a lifestyle I otherwise couldn’t handle. It’s like visiting a dominatrix: you need to feel something different and indulge in your guilty pleasures occasionally, but you don’t want red arse cheeks all year**.
Outsiders (condescending, I know, but how else can they be described?) often don’t realise that a comedian who puts on a show is also the investor, producer, director, publicist, usher, tech, bookkeeper, security guard, master of ceremonies, writer, and flier’er (not sure if this is the correct term but couldn’t find any other word that fitted. Suggestions?). Often people don’t realise that for the most part, a lot of us don’t break even and finish the festival having paid ridiculous amounts of money we didn’t have to begin with (thanks mum) to perform to crowds of two or three people and hope that, if by chance, one of them is a reviewer, they don’t hate us.
I’m not complaining, we’re ok with that, we choose to do it; we learn from it, we develop our skills through festival so that each year, we get better and better at our craft and put less and less importance on what other people think.
Last year (a hazy memory) I lost about $2000. This year I made $200. I’m stoked with that. I almost feel like it’s balanced out, as though that other $1800 was a phantom loss. When you ‘break even’ you feel like you’ve won, because it means enough people have come to your show to justify you putting all of your time, effort and money into it. To make a profit on top of that (even one as small $200) leaves you with the same feeling you’d have if you’d made $20,000 (although I’d have already left the country by now if that had been the case).
You feel successful, validated; confident. All the things that often, comedians are not (I know this is a generalisation, I care not, it stays). The $200 by no means covers the money I’ve spent on public transport, beer, late night pizza runs (ah, Golden Tower) and locksmiths***, but that doesn’t matter. By the end of festival, your bank account and adding ability is null and void anyway.
2011 marks my seventh Melbourne International Comedy Festival. In some capacity, whether it be solo-show-performer or stage manager, I’ve been fortunate enough to make new friends every April over the last seven years. I’ve been fortunate enough to learn from comedians and industry professionals I highly respect and admire and I’ve been unfortunate enough to make a total dick of myself publicly and frequently in front of comedians and industry professionals I highly respect and admire. And though I consistently question what I’m doing here, and wonder annually if any of this is ‘really for me’, I still always come back.
But this year feels different. This is the first year that, although our show went well and the cast and crew were fantastic, being a performer in the festival wasn’t what excited me. I instead wanted to observe other people, manage them, and help them. I never thought I’d want to be in the audience rather than on stage, but sometimes doing the wrong thing for a long time is what helps lead you to what is right (this is not an endorsement to commit crimes).
Every year I say to at least two comedy colleagues that this might be the last time I perform in festival. Every year I say it, and every year they look at me with a raised eyebrow and a bored expression, knowing they’ll see me in eleven months outside the Melbourne Town Hall holding a bunch of fliers, looking awkward. Every year I say ‘I mean it this time’. This year I really did****.
I finished performing in our show, ‘The Hipster Resistance Variety Hour’ last night. I have three nights left of watching comedy, drinking and general merriment ahead of me. Then it’s back to teaching.
Normally I dread going back to what I usually perceive as a mundane existence, but to be honest, my arse cheeks are already a little pink. This is my last year though, I mean it*****.
*This is a hypothetical situation... *looks shifty*
** Seriously, hypothetically...
*** Fine, busted.
**** Really. I mean it.
***** Shut up.