Local comedian and inaugural Brisbane Comedy Festival curator JOSH THOMAS admires Brisbane’s most hilariously suggestive landmark with SHAUN NANCARROW.

"The funniest thing about Brisbane is Stefan’s Needle," chortles comedic wunderkind Josh Thomas. "I love that thing – he bought it as a gift to the city or something? Did you keep the receipt for that one?"

With all respect to hair care tsar Stefan Ackerie’s absurdly imposing, garish and phallic South Brisbane edifice, however, one glance at Brisbane local Thomas’s exceedingly impressive resume indicates that there are many folks around Australia who would likely disagree. In 2005, at age 17, Thomas was youngest ever winner of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival’s RAW Comedy Competition, and two years later his first ever solo show, Please Like Me, saw him named the MICF’s Best Newcomer. He has toured overseas, from Edinburgh to Montreal, been broadcast nationally on everything from Rove Live to Triple J breakfast and has now been named curator of the inaugural Brisbane Comedy Festival, taking place currently at the Powerhouse, where Thomas has run the Livewired Sunday night comedy room for several years. All this success for a comic with awkwardness and low self-confidence providing the very impetus for his humour, who, indeed, was described as "a male youth proficient in the service of his own humiliation" by broadcaster and journalist Helen Razer – it makes one wonder whether he ever worried that it might have been crimping his self-deprecating style a little.

"Professionally, now, I’m doing all right, sure, but I’m still hopeless at life," he quips. "I haven’t changed, I still look like a 50 year old baby. Going to Montreal isn’t suddenly going to make me good with ladies.

"My biggest fear," he continues in his characteristic nervous, high-speed brogue, "is that I’m going to get really self-confident. But whenever that happens, you just have to Google yourself," he laughs.

I wonder if the very personal nature of Thomas’s humour has ever made him feel even a twinge of self-consciousness’ on stage. 

"I don’t mind when everyone’s laughing, but when I was starting out and I’d tell these stories that were quite personal and it just felt really uncomfortable in front of 200 strangers. That is the only time I’ve really thought about it. In life I don’t really care, I don’t really find very much stuff embarrassing. Everyone’s kind of like that," he says, referring to the bumbling, amorous mishaps and intimations of inadequacy that provide the subject matter for his act, "everyone’s fucked in different ways."

The humanistic, everyman quality alluded to in Thomas’ little piece of insight here, married with the disarming, stoic precocity of his delivery provides the best explanation for his humour’s popularity – a popularity which has, indeed, led to this young Brissy lad being selected to populate the program of the Brisbane Comedy Festival, which includes, among others, big names such Adam Hills, Dave Hughes and Tom Gleeson. How did Thomas go about his curator’s role?

"I just picked the funniest people I could find, I just got the funniest people who answered the phone. And then we put up posters, that’s pretty much it," he laughs. "My role was purely creative, I was coming up with acts I thought we should have – I didn’t do any actual work."

So what does this festival mean for the Brisbane comedy scene?

"I think it’s really good for the comedy scene – that’s the point," he says. "The whole reason I wanted to do it was because it is a different style of pressure, a different thing to what we have, like the comedy clubs - which are great, but the chance to do a festival show and to watch festival shows for local comedians and the comedy community is really import. And you don’t get that many chances to do it as a Brisbane act."

One hopes the impressive new structure Josh is erecting upon Brisbane’s comedic landscape will one day soon eclipse a certain other, more concrete, unintentionally humorous landmark – though I get the sense that, for Thomas at least, Stefan’s Skyneedle will take some beating.

"I saw it when it was on fire," he says in awe. "And it was the greatest moment of my life."

THE BRISBANE COMEDY FESTIVAL is on now and runs until Saturday, Mar 28 at the Brisbane Powerhouse. JOSH THOMAS performs from Tuesday Mar 17 until Sunday Mar 22. Ticketing and program details can be found at www.briscomfest.com.

Comments (1)

1. Written by Sazzie., on 22-10-2009 09:04 I LOVE YOU JOSH THOMAS!!!    ....    that was kinda awkward.        ....    ...    goodbye

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