The Who's Who Of Ha Ha: Anne Edmonds, Nazeem Hussain & Aunty Donna Talk MICF

What happens when you get a gaggle (or perhaps a better collective noun would be a "giggle") of comedians together for a photoshoot with a bunch of clown props the morning after the MICF's comedy gala? The answer: some mildly hungover prop comedy one-upmanship. Despite feeling a little dusty, Anne Edmonds, Nazeem Hussain and the trio of comics, Mark Bonanno, Zach Ruane, and Broden Kelly, of comedy supergroup Aunty Donna, are still buzzing from the previous evening's shenanigans, both on stage and off. Like a bunch of kids amped-up on a sugar high, it's clear that the annual month-long carnival of comedy, drawing the best home-grown and imported acts to Melbourne, is a giddy highlight of their year.

That said, it's not all fun and games. Exhausting, gruelling, and potentially damaging to the liver, MICF can be a brutal experience. However, these five seasoned comedians (and we can only assume the hundreds of other stand-ups, improv troupes and cabaret acts descending on the Victorian capital over the next month) are ready to take this fest by the short and curlies and show Australia's comedy fans who's boss.

Smack-bang in the middle of the year's comedy festival calendar, MICF is the biggest comic showcase in the country, but many of the featured acts will have had a chance to road-test their material at Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane Fringe fests earlier in the season. Many, but not all it seems. These are the facts as they occurred. Or rather, this is verbatim what Aunty Donna's Bonanno, Ruane, and Kelly divulged when they spoke to The Music. Of course, it was never going to be a normal conversation - nothing ever is with these glorious lunatics. And from the moment the trio discuss the trial run of their new show Big Boys, things go hilariously awry:

"We've only done it five times," says Bonanno, "but it's good! It's getting there, we're happy with it."

"I'm certainly happy with the new show," Ruane responds, "we've done it five times, and yeah it's going well."

"We've only done it five times."

"That's right, Mark," Kelly steps in. "This has been a shift for us, because usually, in the past, we've done bigger runs of places. We might do six shows in Adelaide and six shows in Brisbane before bringing it to Melbourne. But this time I think we've only done it..."

All three in unison pipe up, "We've only done it five times."

Undoubtedly, these three suited and booted funnymen are well and truly clicked onto the same wavelength, and it seems it's always been that way. "When we first started," says Kelly, "we were just guys who thought things were funny - which is much different than being people who can make things funny."

"I think the trick for us always was just trial and error," adds Ruane of their process. "We'd make two hours of material and then boil it down to 55 minutes, so we just made a lot and found the stuff that made us laugh."

"The other big thing for us," Kelly interjects, "was stretching. We'd be sitting in chairs saying 'what's funny about this? What's funny about that?' And then we just said 'let's stretch it out.' So we started to do these yoga-based bikram techniques, where you would stretch out your body."

Bonanno takes hand of the chat, "Now we can't start a day of comedy without six hours of stretching before we get to the work - which is hard in an eight-hour day. And we allow no writing during the stretching period, it's stretches only."

"Apart from when we write sketches."

"Yes, Broden. Apart from the section where we do the stretches where we also write. In that part, writing is allowed."

While Aunty Donna seem to be everywhere and working non-stop, Bonanno still managed to find time to direct another show at MICF: Demi Lardner's Look What You Made Me Do. "It was an absolute joy and an absolute pleasure to direct Demi's show - she is an incredible talent," he says of the troupe's good friend. Ruane also gives support, saying, "I'm going to go on the record and say: AD heart DL. That's Aunty Donna, heart as in love - love heart symbol - Demi Lardner." He continues, "I didn't direct the show but I recommend you go see it, so there's an unbiased opinion for you. Broden?"

"I haven't seen the show, I have no experience with the show, I've never met Demi Lardner, and I think... you should see the show."

During their madcap interview Kelly also revealed that prior to Aunty Donna, he was not the man he is now. "I used to be a long-haired buffoon called Tim," he discloses, "and I travelled around with Circus Oz across America and Europe. We did a show called 'Big Big Hoops'. But then one day I said 'I want to be Broden."

"You see, Broden is a state of mind," says Ruane. "That's actually how we all met, at Broden School. And Broden passed with flying colours." Bonanno says of the bygone days, "I remember sitting down for my mid-year interview, and Broden said to me, and I'll never forget this, he said 'Mark, do you really want to be a Broden? Because I feel more like you're more interested in being a fuck-wrench.'" Ruane nearly made it as well, saying, "I actually passed all of my Broden practicals, I learned the Melbourne Football Club players' names all off by heart, and I was wearing trendy caps from America. I was doing really well, but where I fell down was in the theory classes, I didn't hand in any of my Broden essays." A disappointed Bonanno confronts him, "You can be a brilliant Broden on stage, but if you can't do a 2000-word essay in your journals on how a hat does or does not make you pretentious, then what are you doing?"

There may still be a happy ending to Ruane's quest for Brodenhood, as he announces, "I've actually enrolled in an online course at University Of Queensland. So I've just got to do a year of part-time theory, and I should be Broden by the end of next year."

Kelly responds, "We've done the show five times."

By contrast, Nazeem Hussain has never been one to shy away from the serious issues in his stand-up, but that doesn't mean the comedian is straying too far from home, either. "Public Frenemy is my third stand-up show and, you know, like all of my shows it's somewhat topical and connecting to me in a personal way," says Hussain. "I called the show Public Frenemy because I've got a love/hate relationship with this country. I don't hate the country so much, I just hate some of the things our country does that we claim is for the good but it turns out to be horrible stuff." Hussain also says of the new show, "For me, comedy is a way to just talk about the world around me and the world at large, so I guess in a way it is political and satirical, but it's always told from a very personal perspective. So whether it's things that have happened to me, from being in a Trump rally on the night of the election in LA, to fighting off people at Flinders St station who are trying to drape me in an Australian flag, the way I talk about politics is always through personal anecdotes."

The presenter and creator of Legally Brown, Hussain has always had his finger on the political pulse, though he admits the point of his comedy is not necessarily to change opinions. "It's just like group therapy, negotiating all of this hypocrisy," he says of being on stage. "I'm not very good at ranting on social media, I rant with my mates and family and stand-up is just an extension of that." Hussain continues, "I think naturally when anyone vents or rants... like for me when I hear my audience laugh at that stuff I'm like 'yes! You see, they're on my side!' So it's sort of more for me than it is for my audience but hopefully they find that entertaining."

While Hussain does have high hopes for the future, he is also aware of the discouraging nature of recent times. "The world hasn't really changed that much, in fact the stuff that I used to talk about has just intensified. You know, I'm a Muslim guy living in the west, so Pauline, Trump, Brexit, all those things are just compounding what's already established. They're new but they're also not new, you know? I don't want to be a guy talking about Trump, but for me, these things are deeply personal. My family, my community, they suffer first hand from the grunt of these sorts of realities. As much as I would like to not get angry at these sorts of things, they just make me angrier the more the world heads in that direction."

Of course, many of those planning to see Public Frenemy, Hussain admits, may not even be aware of his political side. Since appearing in the most recent series of I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!, the comedian is looking forward to connecting with a new branch of audience. "People who ordinarily wouldn't have heard of me of have been familiar with my stuff, they've gotten to view me through that lens and I think they're interested in my experiences in the jungle," he says. "However I don't want to be bitching about celebrities and stuff, that's not really my thing. I will be talking about my experience and my expectations going in, though. Maybe talking about some stuff that didn't air as well.

"I think a lot of people will have seen me on this family friendly show so they'll be expecting some family friendly level banter, so I might have to spend a bit of time guiding them through what to expect: jokes about white people, jokes about my issues with Australia."

Continuing on the subject of I'm A Celebrity, Hussain confesses "There's a lot of risks associated with doing a show like that, but having come out of it now, I thought it was an amazing experience doing it. I know it's reality TV but it was actually profoundly revealing - you learn a lot about yourself and other people and you have to see life on a different perspective."

From the jungle to the stage, Hussain has yet to take a break from making the world laugh. He's even popping up as a correspondent in the upcoming Netflix series, Bill Nye Saves The World.

"It's a show where [Bill Nye] walks through the terrain surrounding an issue and then all the questions people have - whether it be about designer babies or video gaming or diseases or whatever - he can kind of help the world understand what the hell is truth and what's not. I think we need that a lot; we need that with politics, we need it with everything! We need a show like that for every topic out there," he laughs.

"I knew a bit about him before," he says of Nye, "but in the States he's a huge name because a whole generation of Americans grew up watching him talking about science. But now that same generation are going to be waiting for this new show because he's talking about science but he can joke about stuff like an adult now. Oh! And Tyler. The Creator has done the theme music - it's going to be awesome."

While Hussain's voice faintly carries from an adjoining room, Anne Edmonds comments that he's giving a great interview. It's perhaps unsurprising that she's able to pick out a distant conversation - eavesdropping is her secret superpower. Her ability to soak up the world around her, redirecting it through her observational comedy, is a skill she's had since infancy. "I think I've been listening my whole life," she explains. But while this could be the perfect talent for espionage, Edmonds isn't interested in terror plots or nuclear codes. "I love anything mundane - those mini-dramas between people is the juiciest stuff for me," she admits. "I'd probably be a rubbish spy; I'm only really interested in divorce or affairs, that kind of thing."

Other than a natural gift for earwigging, Edmonds is also tuned-in to a quintessential Aussieness, using her personal experiences of "middle Australia" to lampoon those suburban stereotypes. These impressions often cut jaw-droppingly close to the bogan bone, but there's an authenticity behind it, Edmonds insists. "We all make fun of where we grew up, and in comedy you should always stick to what you know. I grew up smack bang in the middle of middle white Australia, so those characters are who I was surrounded by," she explains. "There's a lot of those characters in myself, so that's why I'm so interested in ripping that apart. This is what I know, through and through."

Edmonds is so familiar with this corner of Australian culture that her writing process has become streamlined in the extreme. She traced out the skeleton of her latest show, No Offence, None Taken, in a single sitting: "It's a real stream of consciousness, this show. I basically wrote it on a holiday I went on. I got rained in with a friend and talked at her for like ten hours. There's not much filtering going on between my thoughts and what's coming out of my mouth." This new hour of stand-up once again channels the dark, unashamedly crude, take-no-prisoners observations of suburban Australia that have become the defining feature of Edmonds' shtick, and by her own admission, it's likely to put some noses out of joint: "I do like to push it - I like to offend."

Edmonds' confidence in her material is impressive, but well-deserved. In just eight years, she's gone from novice stand-up to award-winning comedian, with a string of gongs and major nominations under her belt, including a nod for the coveted MICF Barry Award last year. She's also got appearances on top TV comedy shows such as Fancy Boy and Have You Been Paying Attention? on her resume, and most recently, a new, six-part TV series for ABC, The Edge Of The Bush, is about to hit the airwaves. Ironically enough, the scale of this recognition has made Edmonds less hungry for success. "The further I've got ahead in my career, the more important the audience has become. When you're starting out, there is all this pressure to get noticed. But I began to realise that the number one accolade you can have is a great audience that's turned up to see you," she reveals. "My ambitions have moved quite far away from the industry and trying to impress. When there's an audience in front of you, you can't take for granted how lucky you are to be a performer who people want to see."

Catch Anne Edmonds No Offence, None Taken, 30 Mar — 23 Apr at the Victoria Hotel, Nazeem Hussain Public Frenemy, 30 Mar — 23 Apr at ACMI, and Aunty Donna Big Boys, 30 Mar — 23 Apr at Max Watt's, part of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.