“There were some periods there where it just didn’t stop,” explains Mark Bonanno of their hectic schedule. “We try to write a new hour, a new live show every year and it’s always hard when you have to do something on top of that.”
And when a moment to catch their breath presents itself? “Things tend to calm down a bit and then we just hurt our bodies by touring so much, not to mention our whole spectrum of emotion gets thrown off and destroyed as well. We really like to fuck ourselves up. We over-commit a lot. It’s what we do.”
Celebrated for their brand of ridiculous hyper-mischief, Aunty Donna have been known to suffer for their art. Bonanno recalls one particular injury that threatened to derail a festival season. “I pulled all the ligaments in the bottom of both feet. I just woke up one morning and I couldn’t walk. It felt like there were razor blades stabbing into the bottom of both my feet whenever I put any pressure on them.”
Credit where credit is due: Bonanno somehow soldiered on, aided by four pairs of socks and silicon heel supports. That was last year’s show. If you thought Bonanno’s injury may have ushered in a new, less frenzied and less physically-punishing era for Aunty Donna, think again.
“While we were writing New Show, before we performed it for the first time in Adelaide, we were all like, ‘It’s a bit more chilled out this year, the show. We’ve dialled it back.’ Then we started doing it and everyone was like, “You’ve gone and you’ve turned it up a notch!” We really tried not to,” Bonanno laughs. “We get a bit too excited I think. We’re an excitable pack of boys.”
At this point, you might be wondering how exactly an Aunty Donna show comes together. Trying to reverse-engineer any one of their sketches is a tricky proposition, but the difficulty makes perfect sense once Bonanno begins to unpack their writing process.
“There’s no one way that we write any sketch and there’s no one way that we write any one thing, but it always starts off with a lot of post-it notes,” he explains. “That’s how we start: we have a wall filled with post-it notes that just have an idea on them… It’s super, super collaborative. There isn’t a single sketch in Aunty Donna that’s been written by one person.
“What we’ve been trying to do the last couple of years – the biggest thing for us, the thing that helps the most in the writing process – is failing and being shit. The best way to do that is to get things when they’re not ready and put them in front of audiences who don’t give a fuck about you.
“That’s how we wrote this show. This show was very much written in front of audiences that didn’t know who we were, who were there for free, who weren’t going to laugh just because, ‘Oh, it’s those guys from YouTube’. Our audiences can be very forgiving sometimes and we’re very, very, very aware of that.”
Aunty Donna’s increasing popularity has culminated in a national tour, and Bonanno remains humbled by the initial response to the show when they first performed it at this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival.
“I just feel like Melbourne has really embraced us for some reason, and it’s still confusing. It’s still completely baffling to me, because I don’t know who’s coming to the shows. I don’t know who these people are. I don’t even know how to talk about it. It just blows me away.”
BY NICK MASON
