A street photographer captured the excitement on Laura Johnston’s face at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last year. Now she is headed back there, and visiting Goulburn beforehand to polish her routine. Photo: c_for_clicked.
Desperate to perfect her musical comedy routine, a young stand-up comedian from Canberra has turned to Goulburn and small towns along the South Coast for help.
Laura Johnston is performing in these towns while counting down the days until she presents her hour-long solo show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, one of the world’s biggest performance arts events, over 12 nights in August.
Bedevilled by stage fright, the 26-year-old stand-up comedian says she has not done her show enough to be at the level she is aiming for.
“I pass Goulburn frequently so I thought it might be an opportunity to show (her routine) to some new people who have not seen my stuff, so they might give me more truthful accounts of how they feel about it,” she said.
Appealing on social media to anyone in Goulburn who could provide a venue, Laura was thrilled the Soldiers Club offered her a gig on a Thursday night earlier this month.
“The response from people in Goulburn has been incredible,” she said. “They have all been so supportive and so my goal is by 30 January next year I will have performed my show 105 times. I have already done it 30 times; by the end of the next two weeks I will have performed it 55 times.”
Goulburn was a small step on a journey which began nine years ago when Laura was 17 in Year 12 at Canberra Grammar School, performing her self-composed serious song about not wanting to leave school, in front of all of the students and their teachers.
One line came out that made everyone laugh.
“I can’t remember what the line was about, something about banana skins in your lockers,” she said.
“And that laughter had me hooked,” she said. “So then I went to uni and did sketch comedy for a bit; I decided that I loved comedy and quit my job before I had even tried stand-up comedy.”
Her first ever gig was atop a high stage at the Polish Club in Canberra.
“I was wearing a blue cardigan and did three minutes on stage and then immediately afterwards ran off stage and burst into tears because I have terrible stage fright,” she said. “I was meant to do five minutes.”
Nevertheless she was invited back, and progressed to paid work. Canberra Comedy Club hosted some of her paid gigs, the ANU and University of Canberra offered her work and visiting comedians invited her to open their shows. But the income was minimal.
Comedian Laura Johnston loves a good laugh so much she is making a career out of it. She once asked musical comedian and satirist Sammy J for feedback and received a page-and-a-half of his thoughts, and the encouragement to continue. Photo: Patrick Guthridge.
Any artist with aspirations to perform at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival needs money, as Laura discovered last year when she performed there for the first time. “You have to find a venue that is going to trust you enough to put you on,” she said. “You’ve got to come up with an hour show in the first place; you have to do all the printing, all the advertising with the flyers that you have to hand out to people in the streets in Edinburgh. I think the main criteria is you have to be determined.”
Luck helped her tackle the up-front expenses of the popular festival.
“I got illegally underpaid by a former workplace and they got into trouble for it,” she said. “So I got back paid a lump sum, close to $16,000, and that is the money I am putting towards Edinburgh so I can do this.”
She has moved to Bawley Point on the South Coast to focus on her comedy. “I have been writing and editing and working on my comedy but there is not a huge opportunity to perform my comedy,” she said. “So I have been driving to Canberra often to perform and I did the Melbourne Comedy Festival and Adelaide Fringe Festival.” She is scheduled to perform at the Canberra Playhouse in January next year.
She said an everyday thing we all noticed could raise a laugh when a comedian put their slant on it. Familiarity, references and absurdity were rich veins to tap and jokes that appeared to go in one direction before taking an unexpected twist could work well too.
Performing at the Canberra Comedy Club in 2024, Laura Johnston began earning money from her work and encouragement to continue her journey as a performing artist. Photo: @creswickcollective courtesy of The Street, Canberra.
The ultimate test though was an audience and that took guts.
“The name of my solo show is That’s…brave. Because I think it is incredibly brave, potentially stupidly brave for someone with stage fright to become a stand-up comedian,” Laura said.
Keep up with Laura and her upcoming shows via her Facebook and Instagram.
