Melbourne International Comedy Festival is turning 30, and – as you do – we're taking stock with a look to the past and the future. A festival stalwart, Jeez Louise will check in with what has (and hasn’t) changed for women in comedy. What needs to change? Are 'funny women' still considered novel? Who's opening the door for whom?
Comedy is as subjective as ever – but has the landscape matured?
Rachel Berger, Kate McLennan and Jess Perkins offer their thoughts in discussion with host Clare Bartholomew.
Presented by the Wheeler Centre and Melbourne International Comedy Festival.
Featuring
Clare Bartholomew
Clare Bartholomew has been performing, writing and producing new work in Australia and overseas for 17 years. She teaches clown master classes, has been a clown doctor working in children’s wards for 15 years. She assists in training and development of clown doctors nationally, and in 2014 completed a three week intensive with 20 other international clown doctors in Barcelona.
Clare is also co-producer of the highly successful cabaret/comedy act Die Roten Punkte, a Berlin indie pop punk duo that has toured Australia and had 18 international tours since 2006. Her work has received seven Green Room Award nominations and winner of Best Cabaret.
Clare’s latest venture with bouffon group We3 resulted in The Long Pigs, which is being presented by the Sydney Festival in January 2015.
Rachel Berger
Rachel Berger is one of Australia’s favourite stand-up comedians, working variously as a comedian, broadcaster, novelist, columnist, agitator and television entertainer. She’s taken four solo shows to the Edinburgh Festival and her dynamic presence and engagingly sharp observations have made her an extremely popular performer both live and on television, across Australia and internationally. Rachel's high public profile has done much to establish the position of women in comedy, providing a distinctive voice for women's opinions and viewpoints.
Kate McLennan
Kate McLennan is an award-winning writer, stand-up comedian and actress.
She is the co-writer of The Katering Show, where she plays an intolerable foodie alongside her food intolerant mate, Kate McCartney. The show launched on YouTube in 2015 and hit over 2 million views in its first week online. In 2016, a fresh new season of the hit series premiered on ABC iView. To date, the series is iView’s most viewed original series, has had over 9 million views on YouTube and the channel has over 100,000 subscribers. The pair have also written a short-form narrative comedy called Bleak, which originally launched on YouTube before it was made into a TV pilot for ABC’s Comedy Showroom in 2016.
In 2017, having conquered the world of satirical cooking shows, the Kates set their sights on the chirpy world of morning TV with their signature brand of social awkwardness and unprofessionalism in their full-length series titled Get Krack!n, which aired on the ABC that same year. The second and final season aired to much critical acclaim on the ABC in 2019.
Kate’s TV appearances include It’s A Date, Comedy Up Late, Winners & Losers, House Husbands, SlideShow, Offspring, Ricketts Lane and The Project. Most recently, Kate has had a guest appearance in Aunty Donna’s Glennridge Secondary College on YouTube. Her voice features in the animations 1001 Nights, Dogstar, The Flamin' Thongs, Wakkaville and Exchange Student Zero.
Kate has appeared in thirteen Melbourne International Comedy Festivals and performed stand-up comedy throughout Australia, the UK, US, Hong Kong and Singapore. Kate also toured India with MICF where she hosted the Roadshow and RAW Comedy competitions.
Both Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan won a 2018 AWGIE award for an episode of Get Krack!n and received an AWGIE for The Katering Show in 2015. The second season of The Katering Show was nominated for an AACTA award in 2016. The Katering Show won Best Short-Form Digital Series and tied for a Best of the Fest award at the New York Television Festival in 2015.
Jess Perkins
Before comedy, Jess Perkins was a high school Drama Captain destined for a career in call centres. But then she discovered Tripod, frequently sent them fan-mail, and they responded.