“I'm gonna say I'm in a penthouse apartment, just for optics, just for branding. I'm definitely not at the side of the road outside a building,” Freddie McManus says into his phone, apologising for the eight wheeler driving past him.
He’s two shows into his Melbourne International Comedy Festival run of his debut solo show, Freddie McManus Is Stoppable. “It’s been good. I’ve made some very close personal friends over the run. People who I’d never met before, but over the course of the show, we get to know each other and I’ll be honest, we’re still in touch 48 hours later, 24 hours later, which warms my heart,” he quips.
A conversation with the ever-so-polite Brit is an entertaining ride across some disparate terrain (“we’ve talked about grief, loss, I’ve said the word cunt in my first interview”) and if the rate at which he can knock out one liners and bon mots off the cuff can be taken as any indication, then audiences should be in for a treat when he’s on stage.
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McManus has been on various stages for the better part of his life. Born in Australia, he moved to the UK when very young, stayed long enough to acquire an accent and then returned here eight years ago, which is when he gave stand-up a go for the first time.
His promo material mentions that he was “a standout performer from a young age: singing country music (national anthems) as the frontman (shortest) in a boyband (choir)”.
“They ask you to write 200 words about yourself and honestly, panic sets in with immediate effect. So I did sing in a choir. Thank you for asking. I really appreciate you holding me accountable for that particular sentence. It gives me great pleasure to reveal, to a widely released publication, that yes, I was a choir boy,” he states.
Along the way, there’s also been theatre when a teenager and at uni (“I hate confessing this”) and some impro (“people study, people do courses, so I feel a fraud to say I’m an ‘experienced improvisor’ but I’ve done a fair bit of it”).
In 2016, he was a NSW State Finalist in Raw Comedy, the Comedy Festival’s nationwide open mic comedy comp, and last year he was busting out the Louis Theroux and Elvis Presley impressions as part of Ruby Teys’ and Elouise Eftos’ sketch show Mystery Flight, which toured festivals around the country.
Late last year, McManus first performed Stoppable at the 2022 Sydney Fringe, which is how he came to be opening for Jim Jefferies in December when the internationally famous Australian comedian was back touring home soil.
“I’d like to say it was Jim himself who plucked me from obscurity and said ‘this is the guy’ but his manager came to my show at Sydney Fringe and said ‘would you like to open for him at the State Theatre?’ And the funny thing to do would have been to say no,” says McManus who instead, funnily enough, took the gig at the iconic venue.
“It was hilarious to say ‘cunt’ in that venue. Honestly, I didn’t know that was on my bucket list but the minute I did it, I knew it was,” recalls McManus, who says his own comedy style is quite different to that of Jefferies. “I don’t own a leather jacket. I’ll say that. You know, it’s all corduroy and good manners with me”.
Of course, not everyone has good manners, which is kind of where McManus started with Stoppable. He noticed that a lot of the material he was writing was about “where I was either being rebuffed or blatantly disrespected and feeling that I was constantly being pushed back in my life.”
Then the pandemic delivered his family a fatal blow. “That was the biggest obstacle of my life up to that point, so I realised all the other things I was concerned about and had felt rebuffed by were completely minuscule and unimportant, relative to an actual life changing obstacle,” he explains.
A reviewer in Sydney noted his “remarkable skill and sensitivity” in handling the topic, while still finding the laughs, which for McManus is “definitely the thing I’m most proud of creatively”. Not his time in the choir? “There’s no choir component to this show!”
Freddie McManus performs Freddie McManus Is Stoppable at Fad Gallery until April 9. Buy tickets here.