Sam Nicoresti is immediately charming. Within about fifteen minutes of chatting, she has the ability to make you feel like you’re an old childhood friend- and she’s hilarious, too.
It’s not hard to see why her show, Baby Doomer, won The Edinburgh Comedy Festival Award for Best Show in 2025.
When we sit down to chat- joined by her elderly cat, The Goblin- Nicoresti is preparing to bring Baby Doomer to the Melbourne International Comedy Festival for the very first time this year.
Stay up to date with what’s happening in and around Melbourne here.
“The show is primarily about skirt suits,” she begins, “it’s a very important and current issue that I think is affecting people, not just trans women, not just queers, but everybody, at least in the UK and I’m hoping Australia. So I think it’s about time we talk about the two-piece.”
Baby Doomer is not only about skirt suits, though the garment does loom large. Over time the show has become an almost trauma-bonding experience between Nicoresti and her audience about the universal horror of getting stuck in items of clothing in changing rooms. When I tell her we’ve all been there, she says, “I didn’t know that at the time.” She admits. “Me doing this show has been a real outreach program between me and women. I feel like I’ve learned a lot.”
It’s an unexpectedly wholesome image: a touring comedian discovering- city by city- that just about everyone has at some point been trapped inside an aggressively fitted sleeve.
After performing the show dozens of times over Edinburgh Fringe, Nicoresti has the rhythm of Baby Doomer down to a science, but now that it’s going international, there a few tweaks to be made. “I do various accents of people during the show and I’m trying to decide if that’s going to translate to Australia or if I need to learn how to do an Australian accent.”
Nicoresti also asks me an important cultural question: what is the Australian equivalent of TK Maxx? When I suggest Kmart, she immediately adds it to her Melbourne to-do list. I do gently warn her that while Kmart is certainly iconic, it’s far from glamorous, but she remains undeterred, viewing it as less of a retail experience and more as fieldwork. Research must be done.
Her dedication to understanding our local culture is admirable and I’m already looking forward to hearing her post-Kmart review.
While most comedy audiences are really just hoping for a good time and a laugh, there is an unintentional deeper level to Baby Doomer. “With my previous show, the one I did before this, I was very focused on the themes of it. I was talking about queerness and transness, especially early transition… But with this show, I just wanted to have fun and make something silly. Somehow, that has ended up accruing a bunch of deeper stuff around it, because I guess being trans and having fun is still a radical act.”
That mixture of sincerity and silliness seems to be at the heart of Nicoresti’s comedy. The jokes are playful and a little absurd, but they grow from a lived experience.
When it comes to building an hour of stand-up, for Nicoresti it’s all about these lived experiences. “I love thinking about comedy like you would an album. All of the different sets and routines come together as a wider concept… the main structural routine of this show, which is about what we will now call Kmart, came all at once because of an experience that happened. That routine is like, eight minutes- it’s like prog rock.”
Nicoresti also makes a conscious effort to surround herself with a crew of equally funny people. Bouncing ideas off of her director or producer, she sees the process as a collaborative effort. “Sometimes it’s hard work, but sometimes it’s really not.” She says simply.
Whether she’s analysing the politics of skirt suits, recounting change-room disasters or conducting cultural reconnaissance in Kmart, Nicoresti radiates a warmth that makes her audience feel as though they’re in the joke with her, which is probably why after fifteen minutes I felt like I’d known her forever.
Sam Nicoresti is performing Baby Doomer at The Westin – Two from 26 March – 19 April. Get tickets here.
