Growing up in North America, Catherine McClintock knew she could be or do anything.
Hollywood told her. Oprah told her. John Vasconcellos, the Californian politician who is credited with starting the self-esteem movement told her. “It was just in the zeitgeist,” recalls the ex-pat Canadian stand-up. “It permeated everything.”
Even church led her to believe that if she just prayed hard enough, all her dreams would come true.
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As a result, the young, impressionable primary school version of McClintock wanted to be “an actor, an astronaut, and a doctor”. The slow-dawning realisation during her teen years she was afraid of heights knocked out NASA as an option.
Instead, she enrolled in medicine at university “and had a little menty-bee,” she says cheerily, making a mental breakdown sound a lot more cute and fun than it actually would have been. “I didn’t cope and I had some depression and anxiety issues,” she adds more soberly.
The bubble had officially burst. While in real-time it forced McClintock to change her life course, for the innately bubbly adult version on the phone with Beat, looking back on these formative years has given her a rich and complex vein of comedy to explore in her Melbourne Fringe Festival stand-up show Burst.
While she has yet to make it to space, and eventually became a nurse instead of a doctor (“so I could still help people”), she couldn’t shake the lifelong creative urge that her original desire to act represented. A move to Tasmania saw her trying to “find any creative outlet I could in that space” and gravitating towards film and screenwriting as a result. Being a “huge fan” of American sketch comedy institution Saturday Night Live, McClintock was more attracted to the comedy side of the spectrum.
Then she stumbled upon the work of the fabulous English stand-up Sarah Millican, who can deliver a filthy line with the sweet lilt of a saint. “I started to think, ‘oh, wow, there’s somebody who looks like me, who has a similar sense of humour as me, maybe it’s something that I could do’. I had never thought I could do it,” she says, lamenting her lack of self-esteem in her 20s.
After the birth of her second child in her thirties, McClintock spotted an ad for Raw Comedy, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival’s national amateur comedy contest, and decided to give it a go. “So the first time I ever got up on stage was for Raw Comedy and I went through to the state final. I was hooked immediately,” she recalls.
So while McClintock, who became a two-time RAW Comedy State Finalist, didn’t end up living the dream life she was guaranteed in her youth, Burst is about how she started to look at those promises “with more of a critical lens”.
In her research for the show, she’s discovered that the self-esteem movement was actually spearheaded by a politician. “Realising the self-esteem movement was actually a business, and then everything related to wellness…Even religion is a business,” says McClintock, who was once a “hardcore” Baptist. (“Fire and brimstone kind of thing,” she elaborates. “I went to youth group, I went to conferences where people spoke in tongues and that kind of stuff”. Is she still religious now? “Nooooooo,” she draws out, then gives a rapid-fire:
“No, no, no! No. No, mainly because of the lies.”
“Along with Oprah, I just believed everything that was said to me, and really, I would have been a good cult recruit at that age,” she says with a laugh. “I’m glad that I woke up started thinking for myself”.
Oprah, who she calls “the original influencer”, has since been demoted in her mind. “As I’ve come to accept my body more over the years, I just look back on how many diets I went on because I was watching Oprah and she was trying something, and then realise that she actually owns a 10% stake in Weight Watchers,” says McClintock, whose material always touches on the major themes of body acceptance and chronic illness/disability, which is striking a chord online with her clips on these topics racking up over 200,000 views so far.
When McClintock was 20, she was diagnosed with a rare and incurable autoimmune disease called dermatomyositis which has “made every aspect of my life more difficult,” she explains. “I have these lesions on my skin that people can see, so I get a lot of questions about that and have a few jokes about that. They also get really inflamed and they burst open, so Burst really has a dual meaning,” she says of the show title.
Burst is McClintock’s second full-length stand-up show, which she debuted at this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival. She toured her first show, Please and Thank Yous, around Australia, with seasons at Hobart’s Fringe at the Edge of the World, the 2019 Melbourne Fringe Festival and the 2020 Adelaide Fringe Festival, where critics applauded her “fresh, witty and charming” comedy. (Being immunosuppressed meant she had to take a break performing during the height of the pandemic “I’m more vaccine than I am person,” she quips)
For this year’s Melbourne Fringe, Burst is performing as part of the digital program, meaning you can enjoy what another critic called her “natural charisma and hilarious observations in spades” on whatever day and time suits you for the duration of the festival (5 – 22 October).
Recorded live when McClintock played to a sold out audience in Tasmania earlier in the year, McClintock says the digital format has many benefits, especially around accessibility as she has previously found it difficult to find wheelchair friendly venues to perform it.
Although she jokes “it’s not Netflix quality production value” it is a professionally recorded stand-up show “which I think people can still really enjoy, especially people who can’t leave the house. It will also have closed captions, so people who are hearing impaired will be able to read it,” she says, adding people interstate and overseas can also enjoy the show.
While McClintock’s life, like most of us, didn’t go the way she planned, she remains decidedly upbeat about it all, which is the energy she brings to the stage. “Delightfully deceptive” is how Geraldine Hickey described her when introducing her at a recent gig. “She said you come on with smiles and then you hit us with something that’s a bit dirty, or something that’s a little bit mean but not too mean,” recalls McClintock.
“Even though my bubble has burst in terms of being this starry-eyed kind of dreamer, somehow I’m still resilient and I’m still optimistic,” she reflects. What does she attribute that to? “Childhood trauma!” and she has us both bursting out laughing.
Catherine McClintock’s Burst is playing as part of Melbourne Fringe from October 3 – 22. Tickets here.
