The Fanciest Place For Three Comics

It seems Aunty Donna were expecting a Melbourne-based writer, and we were expecting just Broden Kelly on the line, not the complete trio, so we're all disappointed.

After a bout of cooing "fancy" in falsetto on speakerphone at one another for about a minute we talk about the fanciest place there is for a group of three comics who peddle their wares on the World Wide Web: YouTube. We don't mean the website (where the group have some 70,000 subscribers and nearly nine million views amassed). No, no, no. We mean a real world space: YouTube Space. These next level techno-lots are scattered about the world in cities such as London, Berlin, Mumbai, and Los Angeles, where Aunty Donna found themselves towards the end of last year, thanks to the Google and Screen Australia Skip Ahead initiative.

"The bad bits were when Justin Timberlake snorts coke off a 15-year-old's stomach."

"YouTube Space is pretty much the fanciest place in all the land. Here in Melbourne, our idea of fancy is a great cappuccino, but we got there and they did pretty good coffee, you know?" says Kelly.

"I was kind of expecting there to be shit everywhere," mentions Ruane.

"But there was toilet paper in every stall," says Bonanno.

"It was like the good bits of The Social Network," Ruane resumes, "The bad bits were when Justin Timberlake snorts coke off a 15-year-old's stomach."

"There was none of that!" chimes in Bonanno.

The result of their trip: a web series about the '90s will premiere this year and is just one of a series of collaborations that have seen them reaching all new audiences, and formats, of late. They developed a half-hour pilot for ABC's Fresh Blood comedy series, have been selected to produce an online series to help launch Comedy Central Australia and are a preparing the follow-up to their last live stage show, which sold out rooms around Australia, and played at the Soho Theatre in London and at Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

"We started live and we were always a live act first and foremost, because we're all theatre men," Bonanno says of the Ballarat drama school alumni. "The film stuff came very much afterwards, but these recent opportunities have made us better writers because we get to work together more on something different. We're in the very lucky position where we get the opportunity to do both."

"It's the opposite of what I thought it would be going in, it makes you realise the different values of each medium. With live stuff it's like, 'Oh, there's an audience in front of us, we can play with them!' So it actually encourages us to create something really different with the live show," says Kelly.

"You can fuck up more in a live," offers Ruane, "Which is great! Because every night is so different and you can do something stupid and ridiculous and take those risks."