By Suma Iyer
Bron Lewis’ new show, Obviously, is about women’s mental health.
“It’s called Obviously because when we see a woman losing her marbles, we think, ‘Well… obviously’,” Lewis reveals. “Women go mad because we expect them to go mad.”
Through the lens of her own struggle with post-natal anxiety and depression, the show probes social complacency around women’s experience of declining mental health after having children.
But don’t get it twisted; this is still stand-up and Obviously is very funny, with Lewis inviting the audience to laugh with her:
“I went mad three times, once for each of my children. I had a kid, I went mad. And no one said anything because it was pretty obvious.
“I often make fun of how I was mad, and I want people to laugh because, with time and distance, it was quite funny.”
This said, Lewis wonders at the level of social acceptance around post-natal anxiety and depression, which so often goes unmentioned. “Why do we let women do that?” she posits. “We just let women lose their footing and struggle to regain it. We might be rooting for them silently, but we don’t offer to help them.”
Lewis feels the responsibility of representing this experience and its significance to others who have experienced post-natal deterioration.
“I was nervous that I would butcher it and dishonour my experience,” she reveals. “I didn’t want to make a shallow offering or have the women who came to see it feel like I was laughing at them.”
Happily, her care around her subject matter has paid off.
“I’ve had blokes come up to me after the show and say, ‘I understand my Mum a lot better now’, or ‘I now understand what my wife needs’. It’s been the greatest gift of all.”
Obvious Technical Aspects
The duty she feels towards herself and other women is clear, but she is also keen to talk about the technical aspects of her work. She observes her tendency to structure her hour around a revelatory moment before the show’s denouement.
It’s a well-loved format for a Festival hour – laughs for most of the show, followed by a moment of truth and/or vulnerability that reveals something of the comedian to the audience, before bringing the audience back by ending with a laugh.
We talk about the evolution of her comedy and how she creates her stand-up hour. Her leap from winning Raw Comedy in 2022 to doing her first stand-up hour was a matter of discipline.
“I had to force myself to do it. I just worked on it and every week did a little bit of new material [at open mics], collecting all the jokes that had worked.
“Structurally, I don’t think it was particularly amazing, but like I said, I had to force myself to write it.”
She admits that going from five minutes to an hour was slightly more manageable for her than for most because her storytelling style of comedy lends itself to longer jokes.
“That’s why I love the hour!” she beams. “You can go in-depth with the audience and do crowd work. There’s freedom there. How did I go from five minutes to an hour? It’s the luxury of my jokes being longer than a one liner comedian, someone like Nick Schuller, whose jokes are shorter.”
This longer joke format is not always to her benefit, though.
“You get four minutes at the [Melbourne International Comedy Festival] Gala. So I took a bit that was usually seven minutes and stripped it down to the bare essentials, to the point that every word needed to be there,” she explains. “I did not enjoy doing that because, at the same time of editing, you must also flesh it out.”
Despite the discomfort of shortening her jokes, Lewis is careful about sticking to her time. She doesn’t care for the way that some comics habitually go over.
“I hate when you’ve got five minutes, and other comics brazenly do eight or nine. That’s so greedy; just stick to your time!”
Her diligence and conscientious approach to stand-up do not translate into an anxious or exacting demeanour. I watched Lewis open for Schuller’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival show. The contrast between the two comics is considerable, and I can see why he picked her as an opening act. Schuller maintains an entirely different kind of rapport with the audience from Lewis, with a dry, understated delivery that lets you pay attention to his one-liners and elaborate rhetorical setups and punchlines.
On the other hand, Lewis is in warm conversation with the audience, sharing her observations and stories in the manner of a long-time friend. Taking her time with her narrative, the bones of her material are well fleshed out.
Given her ease on stage, you’d assume “bad gigs” are rare, if not non-existent. What would a gig where she bombs even look like?
Bombing Obviously
Lewis was stoically vulnerable enough to give us a stark account of every comedian’s worst nightmare.
“My worst bomb story, the one that stung the most, was my sixth gig,” she starts.
“I was on a line-up in Melbourne, and Nick Cody was headlining. I knew him from the internet and thought, ‘Oh god… He’s famous!’.
Claire Hooper got me the spot, and I was doing all-new gear; of course, it’s all new when you’ve only got six gigs under your belt. I wanted to ensure everything was good for this set; I practised hard and was confident. There were 300 people in the crowd, and I was ready to spread the laughter.
“The first comic was a woman called Eve Ellenbogen. And she… just… DESTROYED.
“So I thought, ‘This is gonna be great!’.
But there was doubt. Eve’s material was very blue, whereas mine, well… isn’t.
But it’s soon my time, so I cast aside my misgivings, walk out to the mic, and…
“My first joke goes down like a lead balloon.
“I started to panic. The contrast between Eve’s set and mine was unbelievable. Where peals of laughter accompanied Eve’s set, for mine, you could hear people putting their drinks on the table. Everything was so silent.
“It was like this for the full five minutes.
“As if to further highlight the pain, the person after me also destroyed. So that was a painful bomb.”
This is a familiar story. Most comics understand all too well what it is like to bomb and the particular sting of its aftershock.
Be On Time Obviously
Stand-up works best when the audience is captivated by what a comic does on stage. According to Lewis, it is as if the comic is “hypnotising them, bringing them into a zone where they can laugh without thinking.” This can be a delicate balance, particularly for a storyteller like Lewis. Doing comedy that follows a narrative arc relies on a level of attention from the audience that is higher than a stand-up set comprised of disparate bits.
As such, Lewis is keen to ensure her audience arrives on time so they can experience everything significant to the rest of the show.
“This show ends with a callback to the joke the show starts on. So even if someone arrives four minutes late, they might have missed it.”
Obviously Making It Work
Stand-up comedy is a process of trial and error, of going to open mic nights, trying out material, and seeing what gets a laugh. Effective stand-ups become good at killing their darlings – the jokes that don’t get a good audience response end up on the cutting room floor or get put back in the drawer until they are reworked later.
“The weakest joke of this show [Obviously] was one I loved. It was about making friends as an adult and how dreadful it is. You spend the first three months being a watered-down version of yourself.
“I tell this story about how I went on a water floating trip with my friend and her new friends. These were not my people. Very cool, awkward haircuts on purpose, intricate tattoos that had strange pop culture significance, but if you asked, you were the idiot.
“For that bit, I physically act out a scene in which I try to get on a li-lo in chest-deep water, and they’re all standing on the sides feeling sorry for me. It’s horrible when people you respect feel sorry for you.
“The joke is about how I’m desperately clinging on with a combination of my fingertips, toes, and labia as I float down the river. It’s a cheap laugh, but I loved doing it. And I loved the idea of one of those people being in the audience.
“But the joke didn’t fit and didn’t have a clever payoff. So I cut it. Maybe it’ll make it into the next show.”
The prospect of a joke about someone’s labia clinging onto a floating mattress being the lynchpin of comedy hour is certainly an intriguing one. Given Lewis’ attentiveness to her craft, she’s just the woman to make it work.
Bron Lewis will perform Obviously at The Street Theatre in Canberra on Friday, 24 May, at 7:30pm. Tickets are $35 + bf, available via the venue.
