Twenty-four-year-old Jess Perkins launched her comedy career after performing at the 2015 Melbourne International Comedy Festival.
Melbourne’s young comedians can be thanked for the large crowds at this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival, with the fresh faces offering festival goers affordable, accessible shows.
This year the festival received its largest number of attendees on record, with 558,000 people paying to see shows, up 70,000 on last year.
The festival is an open access event, meaning anyone can register to participate and step up to the microphone. This open door policy saw 550 shows feature in this year’s program, many of which were new shows registered by young emerging comedians.
“There was definitely a growth in the size of the festival this year from last year and a large number of these additional events were from young emerging Australian artists,” festival executive director Damien Hodgkinson said.
“The growth in attendance would definitely be bolstered by this, as many of these shows are more affordable and preview more regularly than well known acts.”
The policy means shows aren’t curated, giving young comedians the freedom to discuss current issues affecting people in their generation and community.
“What these younger comedians offer is a representation of what is going on in Australian culture and that’s really appealing to audiences,” Mr Hodgkinson said.
“It’s a great way for emerging artists to connect with their community as the shows are entirely responsive to what’s going on.”
The festival offers a wide range of programs that aim to encourage young Australians to become involved in comedy, including the Class Clowns development program – which gave rise to comedians Josh Thomas and Tom Ballard – and Raw Comedy, the country’s largest open mic competition.
This year more than 800 up-and-coming comedians entered Raw Comedy, with the national final held during the comedy festival at Melbourne Town Hall in front of more than 1200 people.
Twenty-four-year-old Jess Perkins, who made the Raw Comedy national final, said the experience gave her the opportunity to launch her career in comedy.
“Usually you have to go to lots of open mic nights and hope to get chosen, but the festival’s given me so much exposure it’s allowed me to skip a couple of steps,” Ms Perkins said.
“It’s opened heaps of doors for me and now I’m getting booked by comedy venues and appearing on channel 31 doing small comedy shows.”
Ms Perkins said it is the supportive nature of the festival that attracts so many young comedians to the event.
“It’s a really nurturing environment and it’s a very safe and comfortable place to start,” she said. “You get advice from established comedians and you’ve got such a great audience who know you’re new and really want to support you.”
Mr Hodgkinson agreed, saying the comedy festival dedicates many resources towards creating programs to encourage up-and-coming artists.
“We heavily invest in the development of young comedians,” he said. “We want to provide people with as much mentoring, advice and as many opportunities as possible to help them get into the industry.”
