Demi Lardner Confesses She Isn't Smart Enough For Trump Jokes

Having performed stand-up comedy "on and off" for about eight years now, 23-year-old Demi Lardner has finally had enough of talking about herself. For her latest show, she instead takes on the persona of Gavin, a 46-year-old step-dad and luxury doghouse builder who traps himself in his basement and eventually goes insane.

"He's a dude that's based on all the different stepdads I've encountered," explains Lardner. "He's on the phone most of the time to a life insurance salesman... he gets a lot of phone calls but can't make any, he kind of just goes crazy and goes on a weird underwater adventure once his basement floods."

"He's a big weirdo as well, so this show is kind of an odd brain mash-up of us."

Hot on the tails of the rising success of podcast We Are Not Doctors, a joint project with fellow comedian Bart Freebairn, Lardner brings Look What You Made Me Do to Melbourne after finding success at the Adelaide Fringe. "People seem to really like it, I've only had a couple of walk-outs," she adds.

Gender-bending isn't unusual territory for Lardner ("I mess around in that brain a lot"), who confesses to often accidentally referring to herself as "a little boy" or "a pathway to homosexuality, for both genders". But working on a character piece, let alone with a director, is a first for her.

"This is the kind of thing that I've been wanting to do for years actually and I'm really glad that I gave myself the opportunity to do it because it's very freeing and different," she said.

The unbridled wackiness of Look What You Made Me Do is directed by Lardner's trusted friend Mark Bonanno of Aunty Donna fame, which gives you a hint of the kind of absurdist humour to be expected. "He's a big weirdo as well, so this show is kind of an odd brain mash-up of us. I don't know, maybe it's too weird," she says.

With 2017 being the year that anyone with a soapbox seems to be airing their political hang-ups, Lardner insists that she is neither "smart enough" nor does she have the inclination to shoehorn any politics into her show.

"I don't think anyone's expecting that of me either. I'm just a silly idiot... I don't think anyone who loves Trump is coming to my show either, [this] weird gender-bending little play that a tiny queer girl is doing, probably not their speed, y'know?"