Awesome four some
Women nominees for the Billy Ts talk to Angela Barnett about dying on stage
‘‘ gender on your You feel like you’re carrying the entire weight of your shoulders.
Melanie Bracewell
Can you imagine standing on stage firing out your best jokes for them to fall on silent ears? Crickets chirp. Tumbleweeds roll by, along with your ego. It’s up there with going to school naked or getting the squirts on public transport. But “dying on stage” is part of becoming a comedian and they all goes through it at least once on their way up. Lucille Ball summed it up once, “I'm not funny, I'm brave!”
For the first time, more than half the brave Billy T nominees this year are female: Laura Daniel, Donna Brookbanks, Alice Snedden, and Melanie Bracewell. Although this isn’t as important it seems, as what Meghan Markle will wear when she marries Prince Harry, it’s significant. Twice, females have won: Rose Matafeo in 2013 and last year Angella Dravid, but it wasn’t that long ago there were no females in the line-up.
Weekend sat down with all four of them to ask why they do this incredibly scary thing and hear their dyingon-stage stories.
“When you’re on stage and it’s going well it’s a form of meditation, you’re so in the moment,” says Snedden. “And when it’s bad it’s like a public breakdown.” She had a clanger once in a small comedy den in New York where she performed her four-minute set to silence. That’s bad enough but then she told the audience to go f*** themselves. “It was a full disintegration of myself,” she says. “And then there was no walking off backstage, I had to walk through the audience to get out. That was painful. I bought a bottle of whisky on the subway stop. It was mortifying but then it was also fine. And now it’s a good story.”
Brookbanks had it once at the Queenstown Winter Festival. “Two seconds before going on stage I realised no one would know who I was — this was before Funny Girls. They had Vaughn Smith, Jeremy Corbett, Paul Ego, and me. I did my speech and afterwards, it was like hearing crickets chirp. And from the back, somebody said ‘yes, but who even are you?’ It was the first time I died on stage. But you get better. You tell yourself that was just a gig.”
Daniel has been through the school of silence, being in studios with Jono and Ben in front of an audience and “sometimes you deliver your jokes and they don’t laugh. I’ve learnt to smile through the jokes not hitting”.
Immediately after Bracewell’s first comedy gig, at The Classic, where it went so well she was fizzed about becoming a comedian, she went on to her worst. She’d won a competition for Days via her funny blog, and the prize was performing in front of a room full of corporates, mostly men, with an average age of 60.
“I had a silent room. Not silent because they weren’t talking to each other but they weren’t acknowledging me. I had no experience dealing with these people who couldn’t relate to me and my teen anecdotes.” Afterwards, she contemplated quitting but couldn’t deal with the shame. “I knew I had failed but it didn’t mean I was incapable.”
Aside from turning yourself into a human candle, it’s hard to think of anything scarier, but these women do it for the laughs, not the silence. Bracewell performed at the NZ International Comedy Fest’s Gala last year and sprinted through her four-minute act in two and a half minutes, but people were laughing.
“I got people clapping with my best joke (about theme parks and being tall) and it was a rush and I was like, ‘they like me!’ ” Like anyone on stage, comedians want to be liked.
Brookbanks says every time she does a show she asks herself why. “I’ll tell myself it’s not worth it but then you get out on stage and feel people respond to what you’re saying and it’s the best feeling. I used to worry that my comedy wasn’t thought-provoking enough and I asked [veteran] Justine Smith whether it’s okay to be silly and just make people laugh and she said ‘Oh my God! F*** yes.” Daniel had stage nirvana when she first performed stand-up. “To be honest I wasn’t sure if I would be any good at it.” And she was. People laughed. She says the hardest part is being judged that you won’t be funny “as a female”. “When I first started with Jono and Ben I had people going ‘who the hell is this chick’ and over the years it’s become easier; you win people over. It’s annoying that you have to win them over in the first place.” As with dying on stage, getting over audience’s preconceived ideas is also part of it. Daniel’s performed a lot of improv with Brookbanks and Snedden in their cult show, Snort. “Guys would step off the back line [on to the stage] when they had no idea what they were going to do and girls would step off when they had a really good idea. It’s not about being risk-averse but conscientious — girls know they’ll probably only get one shot, so make sure they have a good one, whereas guys know they’ll get another shot so just give it a go.” Bracewell agrees. “A guy could try something new, and usually they’re funny but this time they
weren’t, and you won’t have the audience going ‘you see I told you men aren’t funny’. If I try something new, it could have all their ideas confirmed. You feel like you’re carrying the entire weight of your gender on your shoulders.”
They’ve all had to deal with douchebag comments. “You’re funny. For a woman!”
“We’re not there yet [with equality],” says Brookbanks, “but soon it won’t be a thing. And the fact that Joseph’s the only straight white male in the line-up . . . ”
Both males in the Billy T lineup, James Malcolm and Joseph Moore (Daniel’s partner in their show, Two Hearts), are not in this interview. When I spoke to Daniel, Moore was in the background so I asked whether he felt some inequality in not being in the story. He says, “I’ll take all the privilege being male and white, and Laura can have the interview.”
“He’s a real hero,” Daniel quips.