Tom Cashman has a real knack for making awkwardness feel intentional.
He approaches comedy with a sort of loose, sideways confidence, undercutting his own authority as quickly as he establishes it. The stand-up and Taskmaster Australia co-host’s latest hour of comedy, NPC (Nearly Proficient Comedian) is a continuation of the hilarious, awkward, self-inflicted chaos that defines his work.
Ahead of this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Cashman is… thinking about Facebook Marketplace.
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“I sold a set of shelves in Marketplace,” he begins, “I usually sus the profile. If they look large and scary… I mean, look, this guy was pretty muscly- but I can also judge by the tone of messages. It seemed like he wanted the cupboard for his child’s room, and a guy with a toddler is less likely to bash me.” And just like that, our conversation is off to a flying start.
This is the kind of logic that powers NPC. It’s a blend of overthinking, misplaced confidence and the kind of anecdotal spiral that starts somewhere mundane and ends somewhere deeply strange. “It’s basically a collection of funny gags,” he says, adding, “I’m talking a bit this year about confidence, and my relationship with confidence. I’m often fluctuating between not very confident and too confident, if that makes sense.”
It does, particularly when he offers himself as a case study. “I suppose my hope is I’m gonna inspire everyone in the crowd to live with the perfect amount of confidence by being an example of the extremes.”
One recent example: he encountered a man who smelled incredible. “I thought it was a fun, nice thing to notice,” Cashman explains, so he told him he smelled great. The man, confused, admitted he wasn’t wearing any cologne. What followed was a brief investigation, culminating in Cashman realising the scent was his own. “Too confident, I would say.”
If there’s a unifying thread to Cashman’s work, it’s this willingness to sit in the discomfort of his own misjudgements. “I’m very lucky,” he says of his writing process. “I live an accidentally humiliating enough lifestyle where I just humiliate myself enough per week that the stories write themselves.”
Even so, he’s careful not to force it. He talks about ideas arriving as ‘kernels’ that need space to grow, rather than something you can grind out on demand. It’s a philosophy that extends into how he splits his time between stand-up and online content creation. “I think it’s kind of a vibe… there are things I’ll try on stage and you realise it’s not very funny. I still think the idea is funny, but it almost requires too much attention and thinking without funny bits in between. That kind of thing is more for social media.”
The reverse also happens, too, with throwaway online ideas demanding a longer life on stage. But for Cashman, stand-up remains the priority. “It’s my main job,” he says simply, which means the best material tends to stay in the hour.
Touring around Australia has given Cashman a front-row seat to the subtle differences between audiences. Perth, in particular, has left an impression. “Perth as a city is incredibly patronising,” he says, though not without affection. “I think it comes from a vibe of support.” He recalls performing there last year in the heat, only to receive messages from audience members afterwards suggesting new deodorant and linking him to nearby chemists.
“This year it’s been taken to an even bigger level,” he laughs. “I legitimately got a message from a woman who said she’s a yoga instructor and she just wanted to make are I don’t forget to breathe… I don’t want to break it to her, but yoga teachers don’t have a monopoly on breathing.”
Back in Melbourne, though, the stakes feel slightly different. “This comedy festival is like the big thing for stand-up comedians like me,” he says. While other art forms might orbit fringe circuits, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival is a gravitational centre for comics and is equal parts proving ground and pressure cooker.
It’s also, inevitably, a place where comedians cluster. “When you become a comedian, a lot of your friends are comedians,” Cashman explains, “and some of my non-comedian friends would come hang out with me and my comedian friends, and they would describe that experience as being insufferable because everyone is trying to one-up each other.”
An element of this feeds directly back into NPC- that competitive, performative, occasionally unbearable over-confidence. It’s a show that fully leans into the mess of figuring it out in real time. Confidence, in Cashman’s world, is less of a fixed state and more of a sliding scale that can tip from charming to mortifying in the space of a single compliment.
At this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival, NPC (Nearly Proficient Comedian) is Cashman at his finest, retelling the tales of his self-inflicted awkward moments in the most hilarious way.
It’s unpolished in all the right places, but never lacks confidence.
