Aloha, pals! Resident glittery cabaret trash-pile here, Jamie Mykaela. Giving you the ins and outs of choosing a stupidly niche career path of ukulele playing and spouting nonsense. Don’t do what Jamie don’t does (God, I’m so tired. If you see me, hug me. Or give me a Berocca. Anything. Send help.)
Fringe has started. Holy fuck. It’s actually started and I am yet to do a single comedy spot and somehow I have three very lovely reviews written about me. It’s full steam ahead this year and it’s extremely tiring and we’re only in to the fifth day. I’m doing kids shows, variety nights, punk rock venues, and sex based storytelling nights with songs I wrote especially about how my fingers are too small to stimulate a prostate but big enough to play ukulele. I have been asked to have my photo taken with adults, photos with kids, and I’ve also experienced shibari (Japanese art of rope tying) for the first time. I mean, if you’re going to do Fringe – go hard or go home, right?
I love doing kids shows. It’s so refreshing. Kids are such wonderful audience members. They are so attentive and so reactive, and as a performer, you just feed of their weird manic energy and give it straight back to them. It also helps when you’re doing a show based on fart jokes and when each fart joke lands the kids fucking love it. It also helps when you’re doing a show with someone who is a bloody good egg and totally *gets it* when you come in before the show filled with feminist rage, lets you rant, joins in, and then you do the show together. It’s such a nice feeling of camaraderie. I’m in this show for the next couple of days. It’s called Fart Lab 2: The Lingering. It’s quite high brow children theatre. You need to have quite a high IQ to understand some of the nuanced jokes in it.
On the opening weekend I got to perform in possibly one of my favourite variety nights of all time. It’s called The Fxxk Yxu Proms and it was batshit insane. My best mate, venue creator extraordinaire, and big ol’ cabaret troll Tomás Ford put together one of the most jolting lineups I have ever seen. Complete tonal shifts everywhere and some of the most wonderful punk rock nonsense. I was also on the lineup. Have you, as a ukulele playing queen of twee had to ever follow a bloke who screams at an audience aggressively over crunchy electroclash beats as he rubs sticks of butter all over himself and feeds it to the audience? No? So you’ve never followed Buttered Bronson then? I was merely a pawn in a complete act of fucking with the audience, and I came on after that amazing mess and played some ukulele songs that you would probably hear in an insurance ad of SGIO or something. What a fucking whiplash. I think a show like that will be the only time I’m on the same lineup as The Bible Bashers (How I love them so).
The audiences I’ve been performing to have been a bit odd, not odd in a bad way by any stretch but odd as in – intimate and probably not super keen on my particular brand of climbing all over them in silly costumes – and that’s okay. It’s been giving me a chance to get better at performing just music. A while back I wanted to be a folk musician and then somebody told me that I was a bit too camp to be a folk musician. I had no idea what they were talking about.
So, for a while I haven’t been performing straight music, but this Fringe has been a wee bit different. I’m not sure why, but people seem to think that my music is alright and giving me some bloody nice quotes to use around town. The West called me “Sweetly tart”, Mysteria Maxima called me “the tiniest, most glamorous pocket rocket” and used words like “sincere”, “entrancing”, and “hilarious”.
It’s all frightfully good for my ego as you can imagine, but it’s also very nice to know that I can be funny even when I’m doing straight music and that sometimes I don’t need to climb all over people and scream and sit on them to get those lols. Even though those particular lols feel so good.
Now, as a tonal shift a la Fxxk Yxu, I wanted to have a chat about reviewers. A reviewer came to a well respected female comic’s show and wrote a review. Three stars which is pretty average and wrote some things that really rubbed me the wrong way. To kick things off in this review, the reviewer warns off people from dating comedians as they’ll always want to relationship to fail so they can use it as fodder for their shows, he then goes on the compare this comedian to Amy Schumer. Not that their isn’t potential merit with their styles being similar but as someone looking from the outside in, it’s some lazy writing. There are so many (and less probbo) female comics that you can make comparisons to. It’s sort of like when people use the word “quirky” to describe any woman holding a ukulele. It’s lazy and they can do better.
From the looks of things, her show is mainly about her love life, like a whole bunch of comedy shows, but I can’t help but read into this review and think that potentially it might be a little bit about her being a woman who is speaking quite crassly about these things, in a similar way that I’ve seen male stand-ups do. Maybe there is a special club set up for the women who people will never date because they think they will write about them after they break up, like your Adeles and Taylor Swifts of the world. But maybe I’m just projecting or am hypersensitive to this bullshit. Claws in, Mykaela. Keep it together.
It’s hard being a female artist and doing personal material because there is always an air of judgement when you’re discussing this kind of shit. There will always be the odd audience members who has a weird outlook of “Classic fucking female comedians. Always talking about their periods and sex. Why can’t you joke about something that’s actually funny?!”
I desperately want to throw the contents of my moon cup at them.
I’ve also heard at least 15 dick jokes so far.
Let’s see what happens next week in the next episode of Jamie Mykaela’s Tour Diary.
Much love, Jamie Mykaela x
P.S. Pals, if were thinking about coming to see my show you can find it here and if you use the code PAYME you can get a cheeky little discount at the checkout. Or you can wait for RushTix, ya cheap shits.
If ya just wanna have a wee stalk you can find me on Facebook, Twitter or on my website.