AC/DC famously sang about it being a long way to the top if you wanna rock'n'roll. But at least musicians have their bandmates for company. But stand-up comedians, criss-crossing the country for live gigs and the comedy-festival circuit, are more often likely to be on their own.
Judith Lucy is talking about how she often feels before a tour. "I would be so anxious and so depressed about two weeks alone in a hotel room," she says. For her, this dread has intensified over time. "Just the thought of being away from home; because I mean, I suppose when I was younger I'd ... "
![Close friends: Denise Scott (left) and Judith Lucy.](/web/20170320092141im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/y/2/y/e/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.guxm8q.png/1489975221434.jpg)
"She'd sleep with strangers," Denise Scott finishes the sentence for her. "I'd sleep with strangers and I'd take heroin," Lucy deadpans, while Scott dissolves into giggles.
Lucy and Scott are two of the most popular and successful stand-ups in Australia, each with critical acclaim (Scott has won the Barry Award, Melbourne International Comedy Festival's highest honour) and a devoted fan base, developed over years of solo shows.
![Gypsy Wood as Bambi and Asher Treleaven as Peter, "the Gold Coast's most deluded dancing magicians".](/web/20170320092141im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/y/3/7/h/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.guxm8q.png/1489975221434.jpg)
However, the pair have joined forces for their latest live outing, Disappointments, which reaches the State Theatre in May. They joke that "mutual unemployment" was the motivation for collaborating. "It helps that we both enjoy wine and share the same chiropractor," Scott says. "And," Lucy adds, "we are, of course, bonded by shame and guilt because of our Catholic backgrounds as well."
It's not the first time these two close friends have worked together. Admirers of each other's work, they teamed up with the late Lynda Gibson for Comedy Is Not Pretty in 1999. The second iteration of that in 2003, Comedy Is Still Not Pretty, is where they really bonded, they say, as that show was about dealing with Gibson's terminal cancer. It's also where their infamous nude suits appeared – likely to be seared into the memory of anyone who clapped eyes on them previously – and went on to reappear in 2013's The Spiral.
"The Spiral just seemed so easy, it was just a delight, really, and so we kept saying, 'Well, we really better do that again'," Lucy says of the inevitability of Disappointments."It just makes the most enormous difference to be working with someone that you like hanging out with and you know you're going to have a good time with, on and off stage."
The Sydney Comedy Festival, on for four weeks from April 24, is providing an opportunity for other creative mates to work together as well. When Damian Callinan first started in comedy, Melbourne International Comedy Festival director Susan Provan suggested that finding a collaborator was a good way to begin and get known. It worked. With Lawrence Mooney, he went on to devise several character-driven shows with a theatrical bent, garnering them a Barry nomination in the process, before going their separate ways to concentrate on solo work (with each receiving further nominations). Callinan is full circle now, performing his most commercially successful show to date, Wine Bluffs, with Paul Calleja, where the pair "bullshit about wine".
![Sammy J is heading out without his puppet Randy but inspired by another purple friend in the show <i>Hero Complex</i>.](/web/20170320092141im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/s/f/b/k/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.guxm8q.png/1489975221434.jpg)
"I spent all this time writing turgid, solo, pathos-comedy war stories, but get on the piss with your mate for an hour and people love it," he says. Callinan found "great independence" in working on his own, but also says he enjoys being able to come off stage and have someone to debrief with. "You're able to celebrate the highs and lows immediately."
The need for this type of camaraderie was enough for Scott Brennan to quit stand-up altogether.
![Sketch comedy group Aunty Donna.](/web/20170320092141im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/p/t/x/z/g/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.guxm8q.png/1489975221434.jpg)
"I find it much more fulfilling and much more fun to bounce off other people than to be up there on my own," says Brennan, who previously worked with Callinan and Calleja on television sketch show Skithouse.
For stand-up Demi Lardner, the camaraderie of a collaborator has also emboldened her to take creative risks. In her latest show, Look What You Made Me Do, the 23-year-old plays a 46-year-old man named Gavin. "I'm on the phone to a life insurance agent for an hour and I'm trapped in my basement," she says of the show's premise.
![Demi Lardner, 23, is to play a 46-year-old man named Gavin in her new show.](/web/20170320092141im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/s/y/l/o/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.guxm8q.png/1489975221434.jpg)
The show is the first "proper dive into sketch" for Lardner, a rising star of the new generation of comedians (she won best newcomer at the Sydney Comedy Festival last year). She credits her director, Mark Bonanno, for the shift in form. "I don't think I ever would have done a weird-arse character show if it weren't for him, and he really built up my confidence about it and wrote it with me," she says of Bonanno, who is also performing during the festival in the popular sketch group Aunty Donna.
Although Lardner has performed with Aunty Donna before, she was "really, really shy" in approaching Bonanno to direct. "Because I feel like such a baby next to them, I'd never ask them to collaborate with me – I just waited for them to extend invitations. So I put my big-boy pants on in this way."
![Wine Bluffs: Damian Callinan (left) and Paul Calleja.](/web/20170320092141im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/6/e/m/b/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.guxm8q.png/1489975221434.jpg)
"I kind of muffed my words like I was asking someone on a first date," stand-up Tommy Little says of asking Gossling (aka Melbourne singer-songwriter Helen Croome) to perform in his storytelling show he's been trialling at the Adelaide Fringe and Melbourne comedy festivals. To up their chances of working successfully together, Little says, they've kept the stakes low and each has an out.
"Because its not like we're signing a radio or TV contract and we're locked in, with this we just walk away. We'll make no money from this and there's no long-term commitment, so for both of us if at any point we stop enjoying it, we just walk away."
![Nath Valvo, in <i>Not in this House</i>, says creative relationships sometimes just run their course.](/web/20170320092141im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/y/3/7/e/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.guxm8q.png/1489975221434.jpg)
So far, Little says, it's been a joy and he's hoping to take it around the country. However, his choice to work with a musician, as opposed to another comedian, isn't part of some innate inability of stand-ups to work well with others. Little, who is doing a solo show as part of the Sydney Comedy Festival, sees stand-ups collaborating all the time.
"Stand-up is our own thing, so we want our time to do the thing we love, but if you look around at radio, TV, so often those shows are collections of stand-ups ... We love collaborating in different things because our stand-up time is so isolating and, often when touring, lonely. We love making funny things with funny people and so this wasn't necessarily born out of 'I can't collaborate with comedians'; it's borne out of 'I've done heaps of collaborating with comedians and I want to do something different'."
Asher Treleaven and Gyspy Wood were also wanting to try something different when they were devising their characters Peter and Bambi Heaven, which they describe as being "the Gold Coast's most deluded dancing magicians". While their alter-egos were a new couple, very much in love, Treleaven and Wood's real-life marriage was falling apart. Having to live the old adage of "the show must go on", given they were locked into several festivals, they had to navigate a relationship breakdown while performing nightly with each other for months.
"It was very painful and very difficult and very confusing continuing to work together but also simultaneously really wonderful and beautiful and amazing to transition from a married couple to a working couple and experience a lot of success and joy through the show," Treleaven says. They're performing that fateful show, Peter and Bambi Heaven: The Magic Inside, at the Factory Theatre, while working on their next show. "We will tour the show extensively and we see this show as something we'll do for the next five years at least," he says.
Sammy J is going it alone this Sydney Comedy Festival but that's not because of any breakdown in his relationship with his long-time collaborator, purple puppet Randy.
"Randy and I both started out doing solo stuff, and while our focus has been on the duo, we've always taken breaks to do our own thing," he says. "It's a completely different mindset working on your own, more daunting in some ways, and more freeing in others. We like to call ours an open marriage – if we keep doing our own thing when we want, hopefully we'll avoid a messy divorce and court battle in the decades ahead."
While some creative relationships thrive over time, others wind up, and that is to be expected, says stand-up Nath Valvo. "Sometimes a creative relationship runs its course, it's no different to any other relationship," he says.
When The Shambles, the sketch trio he was in originally, ended, his relationship with Sean Lynch evolved from co-performer to director. "I think the word is just trust. Trust as in he won't fake laugh, he will tell me if something is not funny," says Valvo, who was nominated for best newcomer at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards last year. Valvo points out the audience also functions as a collaborator in this same way. "That's what makes a great comedian, someone that can have that ability to cut a joke that isn't working with an audience because there is two of you – you and the audience."
For Lucy and Scott, those nude suits have been working with audiences and that has inspired how they're planning to end their collaboration, when that day comes.
"We are planning for our last show ever to just go on stage naked and then kill ourselves after the show," Lucy says. "No more nude suits, we'll do it for real." Scott adds: "It'll possibly be just a five-minute spot."
The Sydney Comedy Festival runs from April 24 to May 21 at various Sydney venues and includes Judith Lucy and Denise Scott's Disappointments, May 5 and 6, State Theatre, $60. For all show details, see sydneycomedyfest.com.au.
STAND-UPS ON STAYING SOLO
Why do you choose to perform alone?
I like to perform alone because I'm a narcissist. A self-aware narcissist at least.
– Joel Creasey, Poser
I didn't know there was another option! Is there a special stage that can accommodate more than one comedic ego at a time?
– Jackie Loeb, Forty-Five
Best thing about being a solo performer?
If I get asked to do a gig, I say "yes" and then it's done. Also, I used to be in a band, so not having to split the money is still a thrill.
– Tom Gleeson, Cheer Up
Only one nervous person uses the toilet before the show
– Des Bishop, Grey Matters
Worst thing about collaborating with someone?
I don't think it's a team sport. The minute I share with someone else, it's almost like I take my foot off the pedal and I can relax a bit because the pressure is not just on me. But I'm more amped up and more determined to make sure it's a good show if it's just me. As soon as I share, it makes me lazy, is what I'm saying.
– Urzila Carlson, Unacceptable
Having to synchronise your calendar. Ugh, I'd to hate to have to pull out of a gig because your collaborator has to do something you don't care about – like, I don't know, attend a funeral of something.
– Dilruk Jayasinha, The Art of the Dil