The Sydney Town Hall was a little off kilter on this balmy spring night. The formal table settings and black ties were as might be expected of the venue, as was the diverse list of guests, including former NSW premier Kristina Keneally, former federal cabinet minister Craig Emerson, Human Rights Commissioner Ed Santow, 2GB drive host Ben Fordham, ABC News boss Gaven Morris, and authors Anna Funder and Peter FitzSimons, the latter head of the Australian Republican Movement. Yet table numbers had to be deduced from not-always-simple maths formulae; fortune cookies contained risqué notes; and the program promised a menu including a “roulade of road kill (possum, skunk, the weak) fresh baked in a trash can set on fire by a man in a Bernie Sanders T-shirt muttering about Michigan”.
Welcome to the 2016 Sesquicentennial Inaugural Chaser Lecture and Dinner, starring pioneering Indonesian female stand-up comedian Sakdiyah Ma’ruf and designed to raise money for Article 19, a freedom of expression human rights organisation. The top sale in the auction was $3000, paid for “A Deeply Stressful Personal Interview with Sarah Ferguson [the ABC 4 Corners host]”. The opportunity to “Throw the Complete Works of Peter FitzSimons at Peter FitzSimons” went for $1100.
In two years, the loose piss-take of the ABC’s annual Andrew Olle Media Lecture has become more than just another undergraduate stunt hosted by the Chaser boys. They protest that their success, nay very commercial existence, is a little tenuous. But the Sesquicentennial event suggests otherwise. Both established and emerging companies buy tables, sponsors include Commonwealth Bank and Media Super, and tickets cost double those for the Olle lecture. The Chaser’s Craig Reucassel avers “not quite all of them paid” but even so, it’s an impressive sign of acceptance by the top end of town.
“The Chaser might say it’s all not so serious, but the establishment is here,” notes one attendee.
Comedy business flourishing
Performers are usually loathe to admit they possess business savvy. After all, the creative arts are meant to form with a kind of alchemy. Any hint that Naomi Watts or Sam Worthington are as calculating about their careers as your average corporate chief executive destroys that magic. But the business of comedy is flourishing and there’s no magic about it. Comedians and their management are using keen business acumen to take advantage of bounteous opportunities opening up here and overseas as a result of fragmenting distribution channels, an increased ability to retain creative control of their all-important intellectual property, and the insatiable global search by US talent scouts for the Next Big Thing.
“Comedy’s a bit more grown up than people think,” says Kevin Whyte, founder of the country’s biggest comedy agency Token Artists and promoter of, among others, Wil Anderson, Dave Hughes and Judith Lucy. Whyte also produces TV series including Rosehaven, Luke McGregor and Celia Pacquola’s unlikely ABC hit; and Josh Thomas’ Please Like Me.
“There’s no such thing as a dumb comedian. They’re smart people, even though it’s in my interest to say they have management geniuses behind them,” Whyte smiles. “From a management perspective, they’re a dream because you get to have adult conversations with them. I imagine I got to have different business conversations with Wil Anderson than [music agent] John Watson got to have with Wolfmother.”
As comedy is growing up, so too are its practitioners. Some might act like children on stage but off stage they’re showing nifty entrepreneurial spirit. The Chaser – Reucassel, Julian Morrow, Andrew Hansen, Chris Taylor, Dom Knight and Chas Licciardello – used parody as their calling card when launching The Chaser satirical newspaper in 1999. Morrow jokes that it was based on “the Bernie Madoff model, using annual subscriptions to pay for one edition of the paper”. They followed it up with a series of hit TV shows including CNNNN, The Checkout and The Chaser’s War on Everything. Initially, they partnered with Andrew Denton, Cordell Jigsaw Zapruder and other production companies before striking out with their own TV business, Giant Dwarf.
Bigger venues needed
These days Giant Dwarf is more than just a producer of gags for the telly. Over the past two years they’ve leased a theatre space in Sydney’s Redfern that’s become a thriving comedy venue under the Giant Dwarf banner, and established their own talent agency, GiantDwarf Artists, which represents promising newcomers such as Kirsten Drysdale and Ben Jenkins as well as all Chaser members. They’ve also resurrected their publishing arm under the aegis of former Chaser, Charles Firth, who publishes a quarterly magazine after their fortnightly newspaper halted printing in 2005.
The six Chaser principals opened the theatre after realising emerging Sydney entertainments, including improvisation show The Bear Pack and comedy storytelling show Story Club, could do with bigger venues. They realised they could do with their own stage and broadcast facilities, too – and a bar licence helps. From the outside, Giant Dwarf Theatre looks to be a shrewd move, a place where they can workshop ideas and shows while fomenting new talent. When this is put to Reucassel, he laughs: “What you’re describing is a far more intelligent business model than we had.”
Adds Morrow: “We had a few little ideas that were consistent with that big idea but the big idea dawned on us later. This place has become central to the idea of being able to foster talent, being independent in terms of your production resources from behemoths like any network, and increasingly trying to take advantage of the fact the tools you need to produce video content aren’t as expensive anymore.”
The Sydney pals have morphed from being naughty undergraduate “boys” into a business beyond television. Not that they see it that way. Ask Morrow when he had a sense comedy could become a full-time job and he laughs. “I’m looking forward to that moment.”
More paths to success now
Comedy careers traditionallybegan as individual pursuits. Comics would work their way through the stand-up circuit, honing their jokes and style until they could concoct a show for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, or be noticed enough to nab a gig on FM radio, perhaps a cast or writing role on TV.
“In the past that was the almost exclusive model,” says Morrow. “Some people still go that way but now there are certainly more models.”
Rove McManus says his generation gravitated towards live performance. Those who were lucky were picked up to work on projects by Melbourne’s Working Dog (producers of Frontline, The Castle and Network Ten’s Have You Been Paying Attention?) or Ted Robinson (producer of Good News Week). He recalls the late 1990s, when FM radio’s Tony Martin and Mick Molloy were the first comedians to say they wanted to do radio on their own terms rather than make something for someone else.
“Now it’s ‘what do you want to do’?” McManus says. “Do you want to do TV? Do TV. Want to do online? Do online. Do you want to do scripted or do radio? Do it! People of my generation are landing all this work in so many different venues now. It’s widened the net so this next generation coming through has options.”
Serious wealth possible
The paths today are many and varied – and if you get the business right, there’s serious wealth to be made. It’s well known that Hit Network drive hosts Hamish Blake and Andy Lee, together with 2Day FM Sydney evenings host McManus, have million-dollar salaries plus equity from their radio deals with the Southern Cross Austereo network. What’s less known is that a handful more comedians are believed to be pulling seven-figure sums from their various touring and media commitments, too. Chief among them would be expat Jim Jefferies, who made his name in Britain and the US five years ago before popping here, together with KIIS FM and The Footy Show host Dave Hughes and hard-gigging Wil Anderson. While individual earnings are impossible to verify, many more Australian comedians are thought to make very comfortable six-figure sums these days.
“It’s easy for me to say yes, more people are making more money, because I’m at one end, but sure they are,” says McManus, whose Roving Enterprises has fostered many of them via TV shows including Rove Live, Skithouse and The Project, the latter which also developed (not strictly comedic) Gold Logie winners Carrie Bickmore and Waleed Aly.
Live comedy in Australia is replicating the boom in the US, where touring revenues are well up, led by the hard-working Kevin Hart, who is pulling the kind of mass audiences not seen since Steve Martin’s peak in the late 1970s. The comedy surge here is due to the growth of social media and YouTube and the subsequent exposure of new talent, but also due to compound annual growth in audiences and sales at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.
In 1987, that annual event had just 56 acts. Now it’s the biggest ticketed event in the country, with more than 500 shows and a five-month national circuit piggy-backing off it, including the Perth and Adelaide fringe festivals and the Sydney Comedy Festival. A swag of comedians can earn their six-figure salary from five seasons in five months before even thinking about other projects, typically including international tours scheduled around the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Live Performance Australia says the comedy sector grew to a record $55 million in revenue in 2015, topping the previous year’s $52 million. Confined to only ticketed live shows, those figures don’t capture the wealth generated by comedians across TV, radio, DVD, music, publishing and corporate gigs.
Social media is key
Whyte says social media has allowed comedians to communicate year-round with their audience, becoming a more potent marketing tool than anything previously. “It’s led to an explosive growth in live sales,” he says. “Live’s crazy.”
Andrew Taylor, a comedy promoter whose More Comedy last year inked a joint venture with Frontier Touring, agrees. (Frontier is the juggernaut behind rock tours by the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift). He says social media means his younger comedians, including 22-year-old Neel Kolhatkar and Frenchy, have built profiles faster and can sell tickets more quickly than their predecessors. Sydney’s Kolhatkar has 462,000 likes on Facebook and his YouTube channel has 300,000 subscribers. Wollongong’s rangy and raucous Frenchy (Ben French) began his YouTube channel SungaAttack in 2013, has 250,000 YouTube subscribers and regularly sells out live shows. Despite having limited television exposure, Tommy Little sold more than 10,000 tickets in Melbourne last year. Whyte says you wouldn’t have achieved those numbers previously without your own TV show.
Token Artists block books Melbourne’s comedy festival in April, running three shows a night in the 960-seat Comedy Theatre, which comedians including Anderson, Hughes and Judith Lucy sell out for a number of nights. Anderson has 17 shows booked there for the 2017 festival and two at the State Theatre: potentially 20,000 tickets. If the artist clears upwards of $15 from each $40 ticket, the earnings are staggering. An artist selling out three nights at Melbourne’s Palais Theatre – and a number of them can – will clear more than $100,000.
Of course, a performer such as Anderson has paid his dues for more than two decades performing stand-up and hosting TV and radio. Nevertheless, his social media energy and podcasting keeps fans in the loop and engaged. The biggest local comedians of 15 years ago did not come close to those sales. Or have the rapport and connection with their audience.
“Social’s been amazing because comedians have the capacity to communicate directly to … and to have a one-on-one relationship with their audience,” Whyte says. “It also good for fans, who can really double down on the artist they love.”
Prolific Em Rusciano
Taylor has helped former Australian Idol contestant Em Rusciano become the latest multimedia star as podcaster, comedian, newspaper columnist, author, even top-10 charting singer. Rusciano, who in January replaced McManus and Sam Frost as co-host of the crucial Sydney breakfast shift for 2Day FM, shows that a social media profile floats all her boats, not just her live shows. She has revenue coming in from all manner of media platforms, including her best-selling memoir Try Hard: Tales from the Life of a Needy Overachiever; her 2016 chart-topping single Versions of Me, and previously a syndicated column for News Corp Australia. The 37-year-old has the 30-something female crowd, including her 230,000 Facebook fans, almost to herself as an “influencer” thanks to her prolific output and broad range.
“If you can build that loyalty and urgency with your audience, you don’t need the mainstream media anymore,” Taylor says. “You’re able to build up fans so they’re sitting there waiting for what you do next.”
Similarly, performers Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney have used their social media reach to further their on-screen ambitions. Creating a hit series on YouTube then combining it with some brilliant digital media strategising led to their cooking show spoof, The Katering Show, being picked up by ABC TV and US streaming service Fullscreen. Their next scripted TV comedy series will be financed by the US and Australia. The two Kates backed their talent and learnt along the way, particularly from their previous online comedy, Bleak: The Web Series, says their producer Tamasin Simpkin.
“Online, short comedy is the best content,” Simpkin says. It fits with our short attention spans and desire to share. “And with Katering, we were also in one of the categories most easy to share and invite friends in on recommendations.”
They received Screen Australia funding that covered costs for the YouTube series but their business acumen (and the fact that it’s most amusing) made it a hit. They used online advertising and a digital specialist to boost their product at the right moments. For instance, the specialist told them online trending snowballs itself, so when website Gizmodo raved about The Katering Show’s Thermomix episode, trending algorithms picked it up and other websites ran with it. Suddenly, it was viral. Yet the team knew not to activate their YouTube advertising until they had a million views, so that too would snowball.
“We thought now people will actually watch from the online ads because there’s enough buzz surrounding it,” Simpkin says. The first episode received 2 million views in its first week online, yet despite Google’s YouTube crowing that its “talent” makes oodles from the platform, The Katering Showearned little more than pocket money. “We also sell merchandise, which we get more money for than we do from YouTube ads,” Simpkin notes.
Second series for the Kates
The series grabbed the ABC’s attention though, which co-commissioned the second series. The Kates are now where they want to be: making their own TV series for Australian and global audiences. McLennan and McCartney are typical of the new trend of comedians writing their own scripted content, such as Josh Thomas’ semi-autobiographical Please Like Me and Pacquola and McGregor’s Rosehaven.
The concurrent explosion in global screening platforms hungry for content – both free-to-air broadcasters and the increasing number of streaming platforms following in Netflix’s wake – mean Australian comedy producers have more revenue options increasing their pie. Working Dog’s animated series Pacific Heat is produced for Foxtel and was picked up by Netflix internationally; Please Like Me’s fourth series graduated to major US streaming outlet, Hulu, and was primarily financed from the US, with a deal for Amazon in Britain and Netflix everywhere else.
Whyte says his mornings are dominated by calls to the US as American broadcasters and studios increasingly look to co-finance Australian comedy projects. These opportunities can only be exploited due to a key change in business: comedians keeping control of the intellectual property in their creations.
“We kept the IP; that’s the beauty of having done it by yourself at the start,” says Simpkin. “You set up with ownership so the next time you can control how it’s made.”
Avoiding 'non-essential dickheads'
It’s where The Chaser finds itself, expanding ideas across many platforms, building its own talent roster, and having its own screen production company. During the team’s first foray into TV, their Svengali, the powerful Andrew Denton, managed to wrest creative control from the ABC to protect their work from “non-essential dickheads”. (That term was actually used in The Chaser’s first contract for 2001’s The Election Chaser.)
Nowadays, comedians appreciate the need to control IP to also ensure ongoing revenues and freedom to expand, develop and exploit their comedic creations. Morrow, McManus, Whyte and Hamish & Andy’s manager, Profile Talent Management’s Mark Klemens, all contend that Working Dog – the Melbourne cabal featuring Rob Sitch, Santo Cilauro and Tom Gleisner – was the model of how to maintain IP in order to create a business. Previously, comedians were passive participants in the TV and radio industries, prone to boom and bust cycles and the vicissitudes of employers. Now they control their own destinies, as evinced by Hamish & Andy’s decision late in 2016 to return for one more year of radio on their terms, beginning in March rather than the usual January, before focusing on television.
“There is no doubt that among the newer, slightly more sophisticated comedy groups and individuals, the Working Dog model has been a bit of a template,” says Klemens. “Even Hamish & Andy, who wouldn’t regard themselves as stand-up comedians, realise that a particular format or form has a lifespan and they’re very much inspired by Working Dog. Their major focus has been to create their own television as opposed to slipping into someone else’s format.”
The Chaser’s Morrow notes his “huge regard, not just for the content Working Dog created but also their single-minded commitment to the creative projects they would do”. He points to McManus and his company with Craig Campbell, Roving Enterprises, as doing a similar thing by “turning his commercial personal success into a business that has fostered new content institutions, where Rove Live and Skithouse begat The Project”.
Social media makes money
The creative control has led to some commercial bonuses. Hamish & Andy, for instance, have their every radio escapade piped through their personal hamishandandy.com website and not through those of their radio employer, Southern Cross Austereo. One SCA executive sighs that this arrangement was made when “social was seen as a marketing tool as opposed to a tool for making money as it is now”.
“Certainly all sensible comedians control their social media footprint because that’s the thing that carries them from place to place,” Whyte says.
And place to place, at least for comedians, is becoming broader and broader. Writing children’s books is the latest trend for comedians, including Frank Woodley (the Kizmet series), Alan Brough (Charlie and the War Against the Grannies) and Peter Helliar (Frankie Fish & the Worst Computer in the World).
The opportunities for a smart Australian comedian are many, including the pinnacle of a stand-up special for global broadcaster Netflix, says Andrew Taylor. Their aspirations vary although the younger generation of comedian are less inclined to want to do radio, he adds. “They want to act, do movies, get funding for online scripted comedy, but the dream is still to get on TV.”
One trick not enough
Actually, they want to do it all. Leaning on your one-comic success for an entire career is no longer satisfying. Whyte recounts a recent conversation with one of his British peers, in which they mused that they were the first generation of comedy managers being asked to manage people who wanted to stay creative and dynamic all the way until retirement. Meanwhile, Rodney Rude’s recent farewell tour showcased the same “blue” character that dominated the 1980s, while The Comedy Company’s Con the Fruiterer has re-emerged, to a seemingly bemused audience, spruiking Boost Juice.
Rude remains a stunningly successful one-man band. But for today’s sharpest – McManus, Hamish & Andy, McLennan and McCartney, The Chaser, Rusciano – there are businesses to be created and equity to build. Even if talking business doesn’t come naturally.
“I look at it more like we’re an opportunity factory,” says McManus. “People could come in, tell us what they wanted to do and if we believed in it, we could do it.”
The Chaser’s Giant Dwarf employs 20 people on a regular basis, but the number jumps with different productions and pursuits. “We’ve just tried to do what’s creatively interesting,” Reucassel smiles. “It’s turned out that was a business.”
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The AFR Magazine's annual Arts issue is out on Friday, February 24 inside The Australian Financial Review.
