It’s probably normal, Nina Oyama thinks, for funny people to also be a bit sad. Take, for instance, her own path into comedy. As a depressed teenager who had figured out that acting up in class could earn her laughs and attention, she enrolled in an open mic course and started doing standup aged 17.
“When you’re a sad little loser teenager and you get on stage and everyone has to watch, even if you bomb, for five minutes, you have everyone’s full attention,” she reflects. “And by everyone, I mean, like, 12 people at some shitty basement. I wasn’t playing good rooms … but it feels pretty good. I think I just got hooked on that feeling.”
It’s a vulnerable moment that’s swiftly punctured by the conversation-ending roar of a Qantas jet over our heads.
“I should have told you all my secrets when it was flying overhead,” Oyama laughs. “Maybe during the next plane I’ll say something really fucked up about my life.”
We are walking through Henson Park, smack bang under the flight path in the Sydney suburb of Marrickville, a large green oval Oyama describes as her “emotional support park”. She met friends here during the picnic era of the pandemic, when work and the world had otherwise ground to a halt.
Today, though, life for Oyama is looking pretty different. She has just returned from shooting season two of the Amazon Prime comedy Deadloch in the Northern Territory and directing a pilot for the ABC’s Fresh Blood series in Melbourne. Before that she had been busy filming spots on Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee, the sketch show Thank God You’re Here and an episode of the new SBS series Origin Odyssey, in which Shaun Micallef takes comedians back to their country of origin; Oyama visited Japan, her father’s homeland, where she was conceived. It is, she says, all happening right now. “But, like, in a good way.”
Oyama is, as that résumé suggests, one of Australia’s next generation of comedy talents, as in-demand as a writer as an actor and standup. “I don’t know what I should identify as in terms of labels,” the 31-year-old says of her increasingly multifaceted career. “I guess I’m comedy-fluid. I don’t care what I do, as long as it’s to do with being funny.”
Oyama has arrived at Henson Park lugging a 2-litre Deadloch-branded water bottle, given to her on her first day on set in Darwin by a health and safety guy who told her “a really horrific story” about a man who got heatstroke – one she is quick to repeat.
“He was like, ‘Have you ever seen a dead body? They go all rubbery’,” she blurts out within five minutes of us meeting. “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to be a rubbery dead body.”
Based on her work, this is the Nina Oyama I was expecting – a funny, bombastic personality with little filter. And she is all of those things. But she is also an endearingly tender, open-hearted person. She tells me unguardedly about the strained relationship she has with her Japanese identity and the shame she feels about her lack of connection to her heritage – emotions filming Origin Odyssey painfully stirred up. “I think there are a lot of half-Japanese people who did go to Japan every year and do have very strong relationships with their Japanese family. But my family is not like that.” Eight of the 60 minutes we have together are spent off the record. “I don’t know if I’m being too vulnerable,” she tells me at one point. “I really like being silly but I also really like being sad,” she says at another.
“I think you have to be a little bit messed up to want to go on stage and make a bunch of people laugh,” she says. “I don’t think that’s a response that a well-adjusted person has to life.”
Filming shows like Deadloch is a pleasant departure from comedy gigs, Oyama says – “you get treated like a little princess, and your whole job is to just rock up”. She loves TV writing, which can be done in bed with a bag of M&Ms. Standup, on the other hand, is an emotional rollercoaster, which is why she is trying to take a step back.
“Every time I do it, I’m like, why am I doing this? And then I get off stage, and I feel like I’ve taken a cap [of MDMA],” she says. “And then an hour later, I’m sitting alone in my hotel room being like, Well, fuck my life. I am depressed.”
And then there are some issues with the scene itself – “When I was starting out, I was the only woman on every lineup, and if there was another woman on the lineup, I usually hated them, because it felt like only one woman could ever be the funny woman” – something Oyama says thankfully has changed. A new wave of diverse performers has made things “better and more interesting”. But still, “the further away I am from the Australian standup comedy scene, the better my mental health gets”.
We’ve taken a seat on one of the benches that overlook the park. As we chat, a dog stops to sniff Oyama’s oversized Darwin water bottle, which she has placed on the ground next to us.
“He’d only piss on it if another dog already has,” the cavoodle’s owner yells out.
“Oh, well now I know that no dogs have wee’d on my drink bottle yet, which is wonderful,” Oyama quips.
When the dog has trotted off, we get back to the serious stuff. Like how long it took her to realise what everyone else already knew: that she is very funny.
“For the longest time, I had the world’s lowest self-esteem. I just didn’t believe I was worth anything,” Oyama says. “I didn’t think I was good at any of my jobs. I didn’t think that people found me funny.”
That started to change about 18 months ago, when her career started to come together in a way that made her feel that she deserved to be here. Appearing on Channel 10’s Taskmaster Australia gave her a mainstream success which felt validating.
“I don’t know how to describe it, but in my brain, I lived in a little sad egg. And then after Taskmaster aired, the egg hatched. And I was like, Oh, I’m actually good at stuff … I’m not just a worm in the ground,” she says before sighing. “I don’t know, it’s all a fucking journey, isn’t it?”
She remains puzzled by the people who come to the arts from seemingly happy backgrounds. (“I’m like, why are you doing this if you have no real problems? And then sometimes I’m like, and how are you good at it?”) Her own teenage need for validation, though, has begun to recede. “Obviously I still crave attention,” she laughs. But her raison d’etre for performing feels different now.
“There’s so much joy in this job. And I think I’ve found it a lot more lately,” she says.
“I also really like that if you go through hard shit in your life, and your job is to create content, you can tell a joke about your breakup, or you can tell a joke about some horrible, traumatic thing that you face. But if you’re an accountant and you go through a breakup, that breakup is not going to help you crunch those numbers – it’s actually going to make life harder,” she says.
In comedy, “it all is useful”, she says. “Even the hard stuff is useful.”
Nina Oyama appears on Shaun Micallef’s Origin Odyssey, streaming on SBS on Demand now
