After ripping up Sydney’s comedy scene and winning multiple awards, including securing a place as a RAW Comedy State Finalist twice (2013 & 2015), Gerard McGowan has rightfully earned his spot as one of Sydney’s best up and coming comedians.
Now he’s ready to bring his show to Melbourne, before heading off to Edinburgh later this year.
As the first full hour set McGowan has done in Melbourne, his new show is sure to be full of surprises. He claims it took six years of collecting material and of trial and error in different venues before Only Getting Funnier was good enough to tour Australia.
Speaking of Australia’s unique humour, McGowan has a brutally honest and brutally Aussie approach to comedy with his new show. When asked about the material of the show he says, “It’s mostly a show about having worked in civil construction and also a Tinder date I went on where this girl stole some money off me.” Does it really get any worse than that? “Just working with psychos, basically,” he says.
McGowan is also often described as the master of the self-piss-take, which he owns as his angle. “No one complains when you hang shit on yourself,” he says.
It’s this approach that led to his career choice in comedy. “I’ve always loved Ronald McDonald and guys like that and I was always a funny kid,” McGowan says. This explains his tendencies to turn his focus back onto himself. But despite these early signs, McGowan’s dream was to be an astronaut – which is not too far off the mark, really.
McGowan laughs when talking about his start in comedy. “I did my first gig six years ago and it went really well, and then I sucked for two years after that.”
But the nature of choosing comedy as a career means you have to get used to the turbulent, and constantly changing, nature of the profession.“It mostly comes down to work ethic in comedy. I’ve seen some very talented people that don’t work hard and I’ve seen some very hard workers that probably aren’t that talented and the latter always pays off,” McGowan says.
With his increased popularity over the last few years, McGowan has had the opportunity to tour all around Australia. The increased touring schedule has meant that McGowan has had to remain entirely adaptable. “It usually takes a couple of shows to figure out what works and whether the audience knows about this and that. Sometimes a section of the joke doesn’t work as well as it does somewhere else and you definitely do need to change certain things.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re 60 or 14, you’re going to laugh at something. An older crowd will get as much of a kick out of it as some hipster dude from Brunswick.”
