what does it mean to be a comedian?

“Don’t worry, I’m not here to buy your properties,” He Huang deadpans at the start of her Melbourne International Comedy Festival opening night set. Huang tells a series of jokes carefully calibrated for white Australian audiences: all Asians look the same to her; all the signs in Melbourne’s CBD are in Chinese; she didn’t need to waste her money learning English to move here.

In her full set, T.E.M.U. Joke Factory, Huang tells the jokes again, only to stop and explain she has been telling them for years and they leave her feeling dead inside. As a jobbing comedian in Australia, she says, she has learned to perform as “white Chinese” – and wants to stop.

T.E.M.U. Joke Factory explodes a comic persona that is hurting Huang. It is comparable to Hannah Gadsby’s 2017 Nanette, where the comedian rejected the self-deprecating persona they built their career on.

In her 2025 Comedy Festival show White Man’s Burden, Huang performed in whiteface as a male billionaire philanthropist. In that show she asked the front row to chant “white power”, creating a confronting choice for audience members: be implicated in our own performance of whiteness (which meant something different depending on our racial backgrounds), or refuse the performer-audience contract of comic licence.

In T.E.M.U. Joke Factory, Huang says early on in her career in the United States, she responded to a white comedian’s comment that she was “not Chinese enough” by developing a “Black Chinese” persona. Huang says she misses the freedom this persona (which involved racialised speech and gestures, but no blackface makeup) afforded her: it is a discomfiting response to an industry that told her she could not perform as herself.

Across this year’s Comedy Festival, we saw a variety of shows – like Huang’s – which demonstrated some Australian audiences are ready for uncomfortable comedy and complex personae.

Comedy as resistance

Gadsby’s The Evening Muse shows the evolution of their persona, though it lacks the impact of Nanette. Promoted as “like a tonight show, but it’s hosted by Hannah”, The Evening Muse opens with stand-up before inviting guest comedians onstage for banter and competitive trivia.

The show experiments with aspects of comedy Gadsby says they struggle with as a neurodivergent perfomer: rapid back-and-forth banter, crowd work, keeping to time. Instead, they let the strain show in stalled conversations, overlong explanations and by repeatedly circling over a forgotten joke in their setup.

Rather than smoothing over difficulties, The Evening Muse builds them into the structure of the show with clunky transitions, games that falter and timing that slips.

This is the post-Nanette question: where do you go after you’ve dismantled your own persona on stage?

Several of the most interesting shows are grappling with versions of the same problem. What happens when your identity doesn’t match the category others want to assign you? What kind of comedy emerges when performing to type is both a survival mechanism and a slow form of self-erasure?

Tarsh Jago, a queer Palawa comedian, confronts this in Cherub. Its title comes from someone telling her she looks like the cherub in the old Pears soap advertisement – the porcelain-skinned emblem of Victorian cleanliness and empire.

Jago can read as white, and the show unpacks, with wit, what it means to face racism while it is not always legible to the people around you. The mismatch between how she is seen and who she is as a queer Indigenous woman becomes her material.

Steph Tisdell’s Fat traces her decades-long ambivalent relationship with her body, following the grinding cycle of weight-loss efforts that leave her feeling exhausted, strained and a failure.

Her relentless drive for self-improvement is conducted under questionable guidance from health practitioners. Tisdell takes us on her journey from a “good girl” struggling with body image and toxic male partners to a strong Indigenous runner with a loving same-sex partner.

The show is raw and vulnerable in the ways the content demands.

What is harder to ignore is what it leaves out. Tisdell posted about beginning the weight-loss medication Mounjaro in late 2025, and the show makes no mention of it. Performers aren’t obligated to share everything, and stand-up doesn’t have to reflect autobiographical truth. But Fat ends by framing the decision to stop trying to lose weight as what finally allowed her to lose weight, which makes the omission of Mounjaro feel significant.

Elf Lyons’ Swan takes an oblique route: an hour of Swan Lake performed in broken French. Lyons works at a pitch of gleeful chaos that can make the show’s feminist undercurrent easy to miss until it lands an uppercut.

At the show’s conclusion, Lyons’ defiance of misogyny and ageism takes Swan closer to political comedy. Explaining that ballerinas over 30 will die if they hit the back wall of the stage, she recruits male audience members to save her. Lyons repeatedly backs toward the wall and must be lifted forward again by volunteers.

This silliness is also resistance.

Becoming undone

Huang, Gadsby, Jago, Tisdell and Lyons are connected by a shared interest in how a comic persona is built, sustained and undone.

Each is using comic conventions – persona, confession, callbacks, pratfalls – to establish a version of themselves that works on stage, and then to test how far that version can be stretched, complicated or refused.

The question is no longer simply whether difficult material can be funny, but what it demands of the person telling it.

Tom Ballard’s JKS: A Comedy(?) is a play about five comedians backstage, leaving one by one to deliver their set to an unseen audience. Each time a comedian returns from the stage, they complain the audience isn’t responding.

When they learn a famously bawdy comedian, Dirty Dusty, has died, it leads them to a familiar and tiresome argument about wokeness and offensiveness in comedy. Alex (Ballard), a left-wing gay comedian, argues Dirty Dusty was homophobic and should not be honoured; edgelord Jase (Keven Hofbauer) argues Dusty was a legend and that left-wing snowflakes are ruining comedy.

Nanette is emblematic: veteran comic Chris (Bev Killick) says the shift in comedy began with Gadsby’s show, though she can’t remember the title and calls it “Nando’s”.

As the male comedians argue, May (Tiana Hogben), a nonbinary clown performer whose craft the stand-ups don’t respect, starts getting uproarious laughs during their set. Each time they hear the laughter, the backstage comedians pause in incredulity and horror: they do not understand the audience. The gag suggests traditional stand-up – and the play’s central debate – may be obsolete.

Huang, Jago, Tisdell and Lyons — like Gadsby’s Nanette — aren’t interested in defending comedy from its critics or proving difficult material can still be funny. They delve into the more generative questions of who gets to perform, on what terms and at what cost.

The questions posed unfold onstage in the moment a comedian stops mid-joke and tells you she has been doing this for years and it leaves her feeling dead inside; in the cumulative force of a decades-long routine of loathing one’s body and the sheer relief that comes from giving this up; in the instant when Lyons’ sustained, joyfully flamboyant ridiculousness crystallises into something sharper.

The most compelling work at this year’s Comedy Festival is not trying to win an argument. It is trying to frame longstanding problems of personae and audience expectations in different terms.