Alice Fraser

Written by: Si Hawkins
Published: Friday 31st January 2025

It was the first of times, it was the worst of times.

This time we welcome Alice Fraser, the award-winning Australian stand-up, podcaster (The Bugle) and author. Her new book A Passion for Passion tackles a topic that may be a tad taboo for edgy, arty types: good old-fashioned romance. Is it a long-term passion project?

"I wrote my undergraduate honours thesis on a set of romance novels," Fraser explains. "Basically I've always been fascinated by a genre that so many smart women describe as their 'guilty pleasure'.

"I just kept encountering these brilliant minds who loved these books; ate them up in whatever subgenre suited them - whether it was historical romance or sassy motorcycle vampire slayer romance or 'kidnapped by a Greek billionaire' classic Mills & Boon - used them constantly for comfort or fun or escape, but they felt weird about it!

"For me that disjunct between serious public self and silly private self, the sneaky secret joy, is where the juice is."

Fraser is combining her passions by taking that page-turner on a mini UK tour too, with a proper launch at London's Bill Murray on the fifth - in cahoots with Bugle cohort Andy Zaltzman - then a show at the Leicester Comedy Festival, and beyond.

Her university career was bookended by on-stage and on-page romps, in fact. Let's head back to the Aussie version of freshers week...

First gig?

My first gig was at Sydney University in o-week, it was a 24 hour improvised play; you went and got a slip, which had your character and their motivations and then you'd go on stage and play it. I watched for about two hours, and the performers were so, so funny.

When I got up, I can still feel the full body shame prickles from how bad I was. Just so humiliatingly dreadful. And I thought, 'hmm, that's interesting'. Because I'd been such a 'good girl' up til then I really hadn't had much practice failing; I had shied away from things I wouldn't be good at, and I thought it would probably be good for me to practice just being dogshit at something for a while, and then I got addicted to the process of tinkering with the problems of comedy and just never looked back.

So I got medium good at improv through sheer force of will. From there I went to sketch comedy, and eventually - in a period of lonely depression in New York where I didn't have the social skills to organise anything group based - tried stand-up more regularly.

Favourite show, ever?

I once asked a heckler to get up on stage and eat a dry Berocca, which he did.

Worst gig?

It was a 70th birthday party in a fancy butcher shop, super fancy sausages on plinths, carcasses behind glass revolving through on a sort of hook/travelator contraption. There were maybe 12 people at a dinner table. The birthday boy was a fan of the podcast, nobody else had any idea there was going to be comedy, and just sat there eating their steaks in bemused silence.

Three of the four comedians were vegetarian, and we were just stood there in the corner doing comedy as half-cow-carcasses slid by in our peripheral vision. The guy's wife, who had hired us, was an ex-beauty-pageant winner, and got drunk and heckled us.

We didn't even get paid. It was a delight.

Which one person influenced your comedy life most significantly?

My friend Benita De Wit who dared me to get on stage the first time. We wrote our first stand-up sets together. Benita's left comedy behind and is now a successful musical theatre director on Broadway. I'm still here.

And who's the most disagreeable person you've come across in the business?

I mean, if I leave the creeps and predators out of the picture, which I will for now, probably the guy who said to me and Benita at an early gig, [to Benita] you can't make sex jokes, because guys can't decide whether they want to fuck you or laugh at you... [to me] you won't have that problem.

Is there one routine/gag you loved, that audiences inexplicably didn't?

Oh yeah for sure! A lot of my jokes are jokes you wish you'd got at the time, because they're quite funny later.

I had a whole bit about the disappearing anus of the warty comb jelly, that I was so bullish on I decided to do it for the Melbourne Comedy Festival televised gala line-up show. They cut the whole thing, so my clip from the show was about a minute and a half long. I still back that though.

How do these Passion shows work - full-on stand-up/readings/bit of both/still figuring it out?

We can find out together! They'll be something other than full-on stand-up, but we'll figure out whether that's more or less good when we get to the show.

Any reviews, heckles or post-gig reactions stick in the mind?

There was a guy who followed me to the airport to bring me a cake.

How do you feel about where your career is at, right now?

Look, I'm delighted and tired and excited for what's next. My definition of a good life is to have a series of new and interesting problems that I can solve, and to keep being allowed to make interesting work. So far, so good.

Alice Fraser: A Passion for Passion is on sale, and on tour, from February 5. alicecomedyfraser.com