Raising hell

A girl walks into a bar. OK, she’s not exactly a girl any more. Make that a 40-year-old woman walks into a bar. The mother of two has driven all the way down from the Perth Hills, leaving the twins with their dad. She has three minutes to prove she’s got what it takes. Or die trying.

“I had always wanted to try it,” Emma Krause says of her first foray into comedy three years ago. It was a desire born of loneliness. “I had twins in Port Hedland and I wasn’t really coping because I didn’t have family and friends up there, so I joined a multiple birth group. They said ‘If you’re coping, we don’t believe you, that’s bullshit’. And I said ‘No, I’m not’, and we just started to laugh at some of our misfortunes.”

If laughter really is the best medicine, Emma had found a steady supply chain. When something went wrong, instead of fretting she’d think “Oh great, now I have something to tell the girls” — even if it was faux outrage about which woman had dared to snaffle the twin trolley at the supermarket. “Did you see Marisa, can you believe it, she doesn’t even have kids and she had her handbag in one seat and her bread in the other!”

She thought “Wow, if these girls can make me feel good, wouldn’t it be great if I could do the same for other people”. Only Emma never had the courage, as she puts it, to take the next step. “And then I turned 40 and I thought ‘I’m going to be 50 in 10 years’, so I went to this gong show on Charles Street because I thought ‘if I’m no good they can just gong me off’.”

It went better than Emma could have hoped, and she was hooked. “I was terrified but it was something that broke the monotony in life, like Fight Club, you know? So, yeah, I’m a teacher, and I’m a mum, but I’m also something else.”

“And you’re still running some of those jokes now,” her friend Jodie, aka Pony, Lawrence says with a laugh.

Emma and Pony are part of The Motherhood, a fabulous foursome who have turned the daily trials and tribulations of raising children into comedy gold, poking as much fun at themselves as their sprogs and husbands in their shows, Surviving the Circus, which sold out at last year’s Fringe, and the follow-up, Jumumji: Welcome to the Jungle. They are revisiting the former for Perth Comedy Festival next month.

The gals have come from different directions to meet me at a cafe in North Perth, where the sounds of children screeching and parents crying “No, stop that”, or “Get down from there”, in the background seem entirely appropriate. The business of motherhood is, after all, almost permanently being conducted in the midst of chaos and distraction.

Simone Springer gives me the run-down on each of their personas before Emma, who’s been caught up in roadworks, arrives. “So Em, who started off as our MC, is almost like our fearless leader, the mum of twins. Pony here is like our FIFO, bogan wild mum, and Lucy’s the silly one,” she says, referring to Lucy Ewing, to her left. “But smart, so smart,” interjects Pony. “And you’re like the divorced diva cougar.”

And they are only slightly exaggerating. “Most of comedy is almost like a caricature of yourself, you kind of take your everyday life and amplify it,” Simone says. “Though I hope my kids don’t hear most of what I say!”

How four very different women ended up sharing a stage, playing for laughs, is a story that is as much about happenstance and timing as it is about motherhood.

Pony and Em already knew one another, their kids go to the same school, and Pony — “the baby” of the group at 36 who has more than one funny story about being asked for ID — jokes she simply followed her friend’s lead. “Well, Krausy turned 40 ...” she says, to general laughter. “No, she’d been doing it about six months and she was going ‘It’s time’, and I said ‘All right’, I might have had a few tinnies! I’d been writing a few funny things but I didn’t really want to do it.”

At her first gig she got up and chanted a footy song. “It was the weirdest gig I’ve ever done. And I’m only now, two years in, just finding my voice,” she says. “I thought ‘I’m a tough chick, I’m a Hills chick’. I’ve got three brothers so it was this ‘I can drink you under the table, no, I’ll lift the table, hell, I’ll build the table’, kind of thing.”

There was no instant buzz but Pony says she thought if she was going to do it she’d just keep doing it until she was good. Now she’s stopped trying to reinvent the wheel all the time, and is peeling back those layers in a bid to be more honest and vulnerable. “Comedy is really deep for me. I think you’re at your funniest when you’re at your most vulnerable.”

Simone stepped on to the stage for the first time when she was particularly vulnerable, just after she had split from her husband. “I had actually written a book and it was taking ages to be edited, and I wanted some kind of sense of achievement,” she recalls. “I write funny stuff but I would never perform it, so I just decided: you know what? I’m going to try it just once.”

Luckily, she had some sage advice from a friend who was then dating a comedian. “She said ‘if you commit to doing it once, commit to doing it twice, because the first time will be awful’,” Simone says.

The prospect was so terrifying, in fact, that a heart condition reared its ugly head again. “I hadn’t needed medication for more than a decade and two weeks — two weeks! — before doing it I was like ‘Shit, I’m going to have to go back to the doctor and get medicated again’ because it was that stressful.”

Simone describes that first time as surreal. “I don’t remember any of it, that was my level of fight or flight I was at, so I didn’t enjoy it at all,” Simone says. “I know there were laughs in there but I didn’t stop for the laughs or I would have forgotten what I needed to say next! But I still got that rush you get when it’s over — I call it comedy heroin — and that’s what kept me going.”

The second gig was better, securing the “three big laughs” she was after, but Simone would have walked away happy with her double shot had not Cameron McLaren,a comedian she admired, encouraged her to persist. “He said ‘When’s your next gig’, and I said ‘Oh, I’m never doing it again, I’ve done my two times’, But he said ‘You’re really funny, keep going’. So then I thought ‘I’ll just do one more’. And it’s always been just one more ...”

In fact, Simone has embraced the comedy caper to such an extent she’s given up her retail businesses (and, no, she doesn’t require heart medication any more). “Now we just have to get these two,” Pony says, pointing to Emma and Lucy, “to give up teaching and we’re good to go!”

It was Lucy’s job, rather unconventionally, that put her on comedy’s path.

“We were given this character strength survey and humour came out as my number one strength,” she says. “That really blew me away because I’d never thought of it as a strength before — I just thought it annoyed everyone!”

As part of the character development, Lucy had to come up with ways she could apply the strengths that had been identified, so she decided to enter the Raw Comedy competition. “I had no idea Perth had a really good open mic scene, I thought Raw Comedy was where everyone started,” she says, laughing at her naivety. “And it was terrifying because everyone backstage had been doing open mics for a few years and they were asking what I was doing for Fringe and I thought ‘Oh my God, what am I doing here’.”

Luckily she found a friendly face, and support, in MC Chris Franklin who could see she was freaking out and helped calm her nerves. “I just loved it, and I went really well. And then I got through to the semifinal and then the final.”

The next time she got on stage after Raw Comedy, she bombed. “That silence was horrifying and really hard and a part of me wished I’d tried it when I was younger. But then I would have given up because I didn’t have that thick skin. Now I can die and it’s awful but I can pick myself up the next week again.”

All the girls agree. With age has come a certain can-do or, perhaps more accurately, stuff-it attitude. They feel more comfortable in their own skin and don’t regard the flops, or those dreadful silences, with the same terror a younger person might.

For starters, they are prepared for that plum gig. “If you’re driving all the way down from the Hills to do three minutes, you’re going to pummel as many jokes into that three minutes as you can,” Emma says. “You really think about it. I go to open mics and young guys go ‘I’m not really sure what I’ll do’, and I think ‘No, I couldn’t waste one second of that time!’”

It’s why they spend as much time as their respective lives allow honing The Motherhood, which came into being about three years ago when Pony and Emma decided four would be better than one.

“Em and I live a long way away and we’d make all this effort to get husbands organised, or kids babysat and you’d rock up to a Monday or Tuesday night gig that would be loaded with 18 or 19-year-olds who didn’t really understand what it was like to be a mother,” Pony says. “We thought ‘Right we’ve got to find the right audience, we’ve got to create our own’. Pretty much all we needed was to get ourselves two other amazing mums — to get our own wolf pack.”

They joke that Lucy and Simone were the only other mum comedians in Perth, but they had seen each other around the traps because they all started around the same time. “I got a message from Pony saying ‘Em and I have been talking and we’ve got this idea and we don’t want to do it without you’,” Simone says. “I thought ‘I don’t know how I’m going to do this with everything else I’m doing’, so I took two days to come back to them.”

Lucy was hesitant because the material she was writing at the time didn’t really revolve around being a mum. But as soon as they got together to write a few things, the laughs started coming.

“Our first show was in November 2017. It sold out really quickly, it was going to be a much smaller venue but it went from being 30 or 40 people to about 120,” Emma says. “We had heaps of fun and it was all mums.”

On the back of such an auspicious debut, they quickly signed up for Fringe and haven’t looked back, with more gigs than they could handle over the next year, including down south. When we speak they’re off to Corrigin at the invitation of another mum and find their biggest problem is having to turn down gigs. Juggling The Motherhood isn’t easy for the mothers, but they’re not complaining.

“We’ve had such a lot of support. Pony’s husband Blinky (no one uses his real name, either) has been our sound tech, and he’s built us a stage, and he still sits there and smiles through the whole thing, laughing like he’s never heard it before,” Emma says. “And the way he looks at Pony, we’re all like ‘Oh my God, we’ve got diabetes now!’”

The vast majority of their audiences are mothers who have come out for a good time, and appreciate just what it has taken for the four comedians to get out of the house.

“There’s that sense of pride of the battles we’ve gone through just to get there,” Simone says. “And it’s escapism. We all get to go hang out with a whole bunch of adults in a drinking environment of a night-time!” “Yeah,” adds Pony. “I even look in the mirror before I go. Sometimes I even wash my hair.”

Aside from the sounds of laughter, and not infrequent sight of women doubled over, the gals know they’re hitting their mark because of the feedback they receive, though they all acknowledge they’ve been on the receiving end of a variation of the line “you’re funny — for a girl”. This is mostly from individual gigs, rather than The Motherhood, which prompts not only five-star reviews on their Facebook page but the overwhelming response that they are not only hilarious but relatable.

“My biggest was Fringe last year when a woman came up to see me and said ‘Thank you, that was so good, that was actually the first time I’ve laughed since my husband died’,” Simone says. “Oh my God, what do you say to that?”

While the foursome naturally blow off steam about their partners and kids on stage, Lucy says their shows are also a celebration. “It’s a positive, a ‘we’re all in this together’ kind of thing. It’s like the best bits of mothers’, group, without the competition. It revitalises you to go back home and keep going.”

And that’s just what they plan to do, for as long as the jokes take them down that road.

“My ride has definitely been slower,” Pony says. “It’s definitely a 10-year apprenticeship. I feel like my kids will be 10 years older and I’ll feel then I can really shine.” Then you’ll be on The Menopause tour, I suggest. “We’ll all be in it together,” the girls chime in.

“Then in 30 years we can do The Grandmotherhood,” Lucy says. “Oh, it would be the same crowd,” Emma adds. “Yeah, and we could do the same material,” Pony says, quick as a flash. “Because they would have forgotten it and so would we!” To which, Simone finishes, with perfect timing: “Great, we’ll only ever have to do one show!”

The Motherhood: Surviving the Circus is at Regal Theatre, May 9-11, as part of Perth Comedy Festival, perthcomedyfestival.com. See themotherhoodcomedy.com.