Down To Clown: Demi Lardner, Tom Walker and Zoe Coombs-Marr On The Art Of Being Silly

Clowns. They're creepy, scary, and occasionally homicidal. But are they funny?

You could be forgiven for thinking not, but some of Australia's brightest comedy talents are here to make you think again. While the red-nosed, big-shoed archetype is what immediately springs to mind when we picture these circus staples, the 21st-century equivalent is an altogether different beast.

Take, for example, Demi Lardner. The multi-award-winning comic, and self-proclaimed "horrid little troll in a boy-skin", delivers a mercurial mix of zinging one-liners and surrealist theatre, weaving familiar punchlines into a story-driven fabric of character comedy - most notably, a stepdad alter ego named Gavin. "The character stuff is always what I wanted to be doing, so when I introduced Gavin in my last show [Look What You Made Me Do] I saw that as my ticket out of stand-up. I'd really had it with conventional comedy, and I thought, 'Okay. If this show works out then I can do what I've always wanted to do.' Because honestly, I'm not good at stand-up," she laughs. "So I saw doing this character, being this old dude, as a kind of ripcord! And now I've pulled it, I get to be this big fucking idiot on stage. I bloody love it!"

Absurdist, highly physical storytelling — the favoured medium of the traditional clown — may well be the zone of comedy where Lardner is most comfortable, but it does come with certain disadvantages. Most stand-ups hone a major hour show through multiple short sets, road-testing gags and refining their form over several months. But with character-driven comedy and other forms of clowning requiring a complicated and often lengthy setup, the opportunities to test out material are fewer and farther between. So, when Lardner found herself with precious little stage-time to trial her last show, she made a bold decision and rolled out one of her most elaborate skits - Gavin's secret stash - at the prestigious Melbourne International Comedy Festival Gala, in front of a crowd of more than 2000 people. "Oh man, that was the most nerve-wracking thing I think I've ever done," she admits. "Like, I hadn't been able to test it at all before that, because I had no way of fitting it into a regular stand up set. So my only indication that it might be funny was feedback from mates." Fortunately for Lardner, the sketch, which involves a lot of scrambling over the audience, was a resounding hit. "It was a big risk, but I'm glad it paid off. If it had gone tits up I'd probably have ripped up the rest of my show!"

"I felt like it was an unfunny joke that I was doing intentionally, and that's one of the central principles of comedy: manufacture a failure, then save it."

Another maverick jester toeing a fine line between comedy genius and clinical insanity is 2017 Barry Award-nominee Tom Walker, who, having studied at the revered Ecole Philippe Gaulier (the highly prestigious French academy of theatre craft, where training in classical clowning is part of the curriculum) is a fully qualified, accredited, card-carrying clown. His last show, which had the characteristically nonsensical title Beep Boop, was a pungent cocktail of white-knuckle, freak-eyed physical comedy and barely contained prop gags, with plenty of wincing audience participation for good measure. Walker's comedy stylings are extreme to say the least, and by any objective measure, his show should have left punters running for the door (in fact, Beep Boop did indeed feature a running counter for the number of walk-outs during its Melbourne Comedy Festival run). But thanks to Walker's sheer strength of purpose and his innately hilarious charisma, Beep Boop stood out as one of 2017's most electrifying and original comedy shows. And the secret of Walker's near inexplicable success? "I think a lot of comedy to me is just embracing silliness. I have this natural born talent where I'm an extremely bad stand-up comedian, so the things I do on stage are really things that I find funny," he admits.

While his training is impressively well-heeled, Walker's comedy is largely powered by instinct, he insists. "The thing is, I don't actually know what's going to be funny. I just have a hunch and I go for it. So, I might buy a prop on the assumption that there's something funny about it, and then I'll play with it and try and bring an idea to the stage and try it out. What that actually means is that I have a cupboard at home that is close to overflowing with unfunny, useless objects. But every now and then you happen upon something that is just the right balance of silly and interesting."

In addition to his clowning creds, Walker is a notably skilled improviser, a talent he has put to excellent use as a cast member on the Australian franchise of Whose Line Is It Anyway? His solo outings, however, have required a far more meticulous level of preparation. In what was arguably the most committed punchline of any show from 2017's comedy festival season, Walker shaved the top of his head for a visual punchline at the climax of his show. To keep the gambit under wraps (quite literally), he was forced to wear a beanie through 2017's unseasonably warm autumn. "My resolution for this year is to make a show that doesn't ruin my life quite so comprehensively," he laughs. "I did that shaved head bit purely because I was like, 'There's something funny here.' Then once it was already too late, I didn't have something funny for it and it was the worst month and half of my life. When I finally came up with the hook of revealing it, it was basically out of pure desperation. But actually, that bit in my show, I felt like it was an unfunny joke that I was doing intentionally, and that's one of the central principles of comedy: manufacture a failure, then save it."

Despite one surprisingly believable punchline in her Barry Award-winning 2016 show, Trigger Warning, comedian and theatre-maker Zoe Coombs Marr has not attended the Ecole Philippe Gaulier. But nonetheless, she feels an affinity for the clowning spirit. "I started doing stand-up and theatre at around the same time, and there are parts of both art forms that I really love. I'm so attracted to the simplicity of stand-up, but the possibilities of what you can do with an audience through theatre are also really exciting. And clowning has a foot in both camps," she notes.

After a year collaborating with cabaret firebrands Ursula Martinez and Adrienne Truscott on the infallibly brilliant Wild Bore, Coombs Marr is returning to the stand-up stage in 2017 with a brand-new show, Bossy Bottom. The return to a more traditional mode of comedy has offered her a chance to hit the reset button. In her last stand-up show, Coombs Marr conjured a chauvinistic alter ego named Dave, using this hyper-macho bullshit artist to lampoon a particularly odious yet oh so familiar form of misogyny. But this year, the comic is getting back to basics. "It's about paring that back and actually being able to just connect a little more directly with the audience. A character acts as a bit of a screen between you and an audience, it keeps you at arm's length," she explains. "I'm actually kind of obsessed with the audience. I've always been real obsessed with the audience, so this show's going to be all about them. I actually think of the audience as a weird entity, like it's my mate or something. I'm always really pleased to see them."

Zoe Coombs Marr presents Bossy Bottom from 14 Mar, Tom Walker presents Honk Honk Honk Honk Honk from 20 Mar, Demi Lardner presents I Love Skeleton from 23 Mar, at Brisbane Powerhouse