According to member Mark Bonanno, it takes a lot of serious work to be silly for a living. “We’re doing it full time. Ten to six Monday to Friday pretty constantly,” says Bonanno. This isn’t a surprise when you consider their huge output, spanning podcasts, live shows, YouTube videos and an upcoming pilot. “We’ve always just wanted to be funny in whatever way we can without putting ourselves in a box. We really love sketch but it always happened by accident for us.”
For Bonanno, all of this was hard to imagine back when Aunty Donna was just a bunch of guys studying theatre at uni.
“It all happened really fast,” he says. “It was me and my mates messing about and then our first Comedy Festival show got nominated for a Golden Gibbo Award. We didn’t win, but the fact that we got nominated made us think this could be a real thing. For the past five years it’s been very serious in terms of trying to make it a business and trying to work hard at it.”
Ultimately, their dedication has been rewarded with a remarkably devoted fan base.
“I don’t know what it is that we’ve done to inspire that – or why us and why not a whole bunch of other very talented people who deserve it – but it’s all about the fans,” says Bonnano. “We’re so lucky. When you’re generating your own material it can really feel like there’s no point in doing it. We’ve been lucky enough to have people who care and don’t want us to stop right now.”
If their success can be attributed to anything, it’s their distinctive comic voice. Fast, manic, and couched in an unpretentious sense of irony, their work combines a broad slapstick sensibility with a knack for finding the absurd in the everyday. Like most great comedy groups, it’s a product of their varied tastes.
“None of us like the same stuff in terms of comedy,” says Bonnano. “There are some obvious cross-over points, but we came together at drama school because we liked the way each other performed and found each other very funny on stage.”
Like all things Auntie Donna however, their unique comedic perspective was the result of a lot of work.
“Before we made anything, we spent a year talking about doing comedy and how we’d approach it,” he says. “We recorded demos in our mates’ bedrooms and sent little sketch ideas to each other over Facebook. I think that time helped us gauge each other’s interests.”
It was through this process of deliberation and workshopping that the Donna Boys seized on their essence.
“At some point we said, ‘You know what’s not really being done anymore? Stuff that’s big and dumb and silly.’ We’re all such fans of that style of comedy but it took us a long time to find a way to do it and do it in our own way.”
Over their five years together, that basic premise has become an intricate world of characters and recurring bits. As Bonnano will tell you, it’s a world they are eager to explore further in their new sitcom, the pilot of which they’ve just finished filming.
“I’ve personally really enjoyed making [the pilot] because it’s so different and something that we’ve always wanted to do,” he says. “We’ve had to take the characters that have been developing in the live show and really refine them which has been awesome”.
Whether its live sketch or videos, all of their work is grounded in a simple principle. “When we work, we’ve always got ‘whatever’s funniest’ written on the wall. It’s just really important to use that. People are laughing and enjoying the show. Nothing else really matters.” Adherence to this principle requires a very careful process of comic distillation. “We sort of Moneyball our sketches, if that reference makes sense. Before our show last year we did a string of test shows where we would literally write brand new material Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and then perform it all on the Thursday night. We try to set the bar really high for ourselves.” He pauses before laughing. “Though if you see our shows, that might not seem like the case.”
Fans can see the fruits of this process in action, when Aunty Donna return to the Melbourne Comedy Festival with their new show Big Boys. “As usual, it’s a sketch show but it is something a little bit different this time,” he says. “It’s got one of my favourite opening sketches we’ve ever done.” If you’re worried this means the Donna boys are going high concept, Bonnano has some words of reassurance.
“The theme of the show is being ‘big boys’ which isn’t a thing. It’s stupid, and they’re not real words,” he laughs. “That’s what it’s about – stupid things that don’t mean anything.”
By Tiernan Morrison
