Hot Department (Honor Wolff and Patrick Durnan Silva) are the wildest queer sketch alternative comedy duo in Australia, perhaps the world.
The effortlessly hilarious comedians bring their new show After Party to the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, where they’ve become massive fan favourites, earned rave reviews, and won support and slots from the likes of Netflix, the ABC, and Aunty Donna.
We talked to them about their comedic upbringing, their incredible dynamic, and why their new show perfectly surmises the energy and reputation they’ve carved out so far.
Keep up with Melbourne’s latest comedy news, reviews and interviews here.
Was there a specific experience that inspired each of you into comedy?
Honor: It was the first day of O-week at university, and my sister had told me to try very hard to make friends, as I’d just moved to Ballarat. I found I had a really good, kind of psychopathic ability to turn on, and make people laugh. I found myself surrounded by people and just doing bits and bits and bits. Pat said he saw me that day and said I looked like the most popular girl, I’m definitely not that kind of person, but I realised I had a psychopathic ability to make people listen to me and hopefully make them laugh. I can use humour to make people like me, which kind of felt sad…
Pat: In highschool, like most comedians, in order not to get bullied I had to turn on the funny. I used to love watching Sarah Silverman, Mighty Boosh, SNL and because I grew up in a country town, not many people knew about these things, so I used to just go to school and repeat the jokes.
Honor: Pat’s been stealing jokes since he was 12.
Pat: Some of them were quite edgy, especially Sarah Silverman, I was probably 12 just a little country-town gay boy saying ‘And to think that the vagina…’ People would be like ‘Oh my god, you’re so edgy’.
Honor: This is why our comedy works so well because I remember in primary school just telling people shocking things – talking about sex, my vagina, things that were a bit outrageous – and in many ways I’m just the same 11-year-old on stage, trying to impress people by doing something slightly vulgar.
You must have so much trust between the both of you?
Honor: I always carry a knife because Pat’s done some fucked shit in his life.
Pat: It’s like soulmates…it was so exciting to have someone you could bounce off, who could up you, make your jokes even more exciting, going on that turn or that journey with you. We would stay up until 3am in our living room making sketches. We were both like ‘We’re going to be actors’ and then we realised the real world was going to be much tougher.
Honor: We weren’t hot enough for Neighbours.
Pat: I was too gay, not the cool gay, just too much. We were going to make a web series and then thought ‘Ah, we don’t know how to do that’ so we started out first sketch comedy show and thought ‘Fuck, this really works.’
Honor: We’re fucking idiots for not doing that web series, that could have gone off. We could have been YouTube stars.
What’s your process of writing sketches?
Pat: We have this dolphin, and we say ‘Sheree, what’s funny?’
Honor: And we have different pebbles, and she’ll pick up different pebbles and it will kind of make a word. Then we do a blood sacrifice.
Pat: Then we just steal jokes from other comedians. We don’t stop, we can’t switch off. We’ll be sitting there watching TV and start making jokes and then a character will come from it.
Honor: We have a million notes, a million voice recordings which sound like we’re on drugs: ‘I’ve got a great idea about a woman whose house is made out of pickles and then the three bears eat her’ and then we’ll listen to it in the morning and be like ‘What the fuck was that?’
Pat: A lot of the time we just improvise until we find the really golden bit.
View this post on Instagram
Do you ever disagree on whether a sketch should be included?
Honor: It happens and it’s so weird. I’ll be like ‘No, this is really funny’ and Pat will say ‘I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about’ and I’ll be like ‘Why don’t you understand me, it’s this thing, you get it.’ We’ve worked out great ways to communicate in those situations. There’s ways of being like ‘Trust me, I absolutely believe this will work’.
Pat: We even came up with this thing recently called ‘a plate of cringe’ when you have an idea and you don’t know what it is fully, it’s not your favourite thing, and you can just say ‘What about a talking brick?’ and there’s no sense of judgement. We’re just going to work off something.
Honor: What if it’s Madonna, on an iceberg, eating buckets of fish?
Pat: Actually that’s really good, write it down.
Honor: This might just be comedy chat, but there’s this thing that Melbourne crowds are really PC, but in Sydney you can say whatever you want. We don’t want to push boundaries around racism or anything like that, but Pat and I will be making out and saying we’re brother and sister, and they’ll go ‘That’s too far’.
Pat: We love playing fools, manically running around, just trying to do the best they can but failing hilariously. We love turning left and left and thinking how can we twist this more? We love thinking ‘How funny would it be if we were doing this really pleasant gig and then all of a sudden, Honor is Satan and I’m Eve from Adam and Eve, and she’s drinking my period blood.’ Some people hate it, some people fucking froth it.
What can you tell us about After Party?
Honor: It’s essentially Honor and Patrick, doing an after party, and doing a bunch of sketches around parties. Things going wrong, things going right. It’s going to be up-tempo, surprisingly surreal and at times sad. Sexy, high-energy, fun and full-on surreal sketches.
We’re going to electrocute people on arrival until they’re unconscious. We want them to come and see the show and then want to go to kick-ons afterward. A lot of our shows do have that electric, late-night party feel so the title of the show was a bit of a no-brainer. A lot of the sketches we’ve made do work really well with this concept of the after party.
Rapid-fire. Three words each to describe After Party?
Pat: Big, bright and sexy.
Honor: High energy, hilarious and surprising. It’s like a face melting acid nightmare.
Pat: No, no it’s definitely not that.
