Rhys Nicholson

"You have to name your show six months before you've even thought about it, so I named it after the most common noise appearing in my shows,” says young comic Rhys Nicholson of this year's hour of stand-up, Eurgh. “I also did like the idea of people having to ask for tickets for it – 'Can I get tickets to Urrgh? Eeergh? Errrgh?'”

You might recall Nicholson as the big-haired Raw Comedy finalist in 2009, who went on to win Sydney Comedy Festival's best newcomer gong in 2012. Punchy and forthright, he's not afraid to share personal stories on stage. He self-deprecatingly describes his new show as “my usual talk-about-myself kind of bullshit” but that's become his stock-in-trade. “My first stand-up spot when I did Raw Comedy was about losing my virginity, and that was kind of weird – but I've always tried to be fully open. I find myself in that situation often where part of your brain goes 'Should I do that thing? It might be embarrassing' but the other part goes 'Yeah, but it could also be ten minutes of material on stage'. I think audiences can smell it when you're being disingenuous.”

Nicholson is relatively new to the comedy scene but has quit his day job to go pro, which plays merry hell with his non-productivity guilt. “I'm a pretty lazy person and I had an excuse when I had a day job for not writing, but now I don't. So I try these days to sit and write because it's my only job now. I'm an A-grade procrastinator. Even at school I was a really good last-minute crammer. Really good at pulling it out of my arse. Wow, both those sentences are really sexually charged.”

Nicholson has done some television work in the past but recently teamed up with fellow gay comic Joel Creasey to film a short ABC doco in Colac, Victoria – a town where Creasey was recently a victim of homophobia. “It was actually a very fulfilling week. The way I dress, I get called 'faggot' on the street quite often but it was guns a-blazin' [in Colac]! I'm from Newcastle so I'm used to it. When I first started comedy the whole idea was to have my hair as big as I possibly could and be as bright as I possibly could. But now, it's more about juxtaposition – dressing in a really nice suit while telling graphic hand-job stories.”