Alice Fraser's comedy gets into the strange cracks of the human experience and unfolds complicated things.
Her show Savage was about death and chronic illness.
Her newest show Twist, which comes to Newcastle Comedy Club as a part of Newcastle Fringe Festival, is about motherhood. But maybe not motherhood in the way might you expect.
"I think giving birth makes you think about death almost immediately," she says.
"First of all, you're bringing one death into the world, and you know, if you shoot someone, maybe they die. If you give birth to someone, they will definitely die."
When Fraser gives you a few minutes of her time she will say things to make you think, regardless of whether it's on stage or on a riveting Zoom call. The thirty-something lawyer-turned-stand-up comedian is a new mum and vagabond.
She'll perform Twist in Adelaide prior to Newcastle, then she'll go on to Melbourne, Tokyo, London and Edinburgh. After that it's TBD.
"Do I have a home?" she muses when asked where hers is. She's split her life between the UK and Australia.
"The moment you go live somewhere else, you sign up for the reality that you will never have all your friends in the same room ever again. Everything has a price," she says.
In March of 2020 she lived in London and came back to Sydney for a visit. The pandemic happened and she had a baby, an unexpected twist. (Her belongings are still in a London storage locker.)
Now when she goes on tour her daughter travels with her; she's got their routine down to a fine art.
"I've spent 98 per cent of my time over the last year bringing up a baby, so I'm going to talk about it," she says of her latest show. "Nothing else has been in my head. So many shows by new mothers are like, 'by mums for mums, and I feel like it's not. I don't want to write a show that leaves people out."
Fraser's show about motherhood speaks to everyone, not just parents. She's hoping a 19-year-old boy in the audience might appreciate it, or even the type of person who calls parents "breeders".
She wants her comedy to make people feel more collectively human, not characterised in one group or another. She hopes everyone can relate to her shows, but she does find her fans tend to be nerds and outsiders. People who enjoy "thinking about stuff" tend to like her work.
"People who enjoy thinking about stuff, as a thing to do. Not that many people actually like thinking about stuff," Fraser says.
"I remember being quite surprised by that growing up. I really enjoy going, 'oh wait a minute I was wrong about something' and having to reassess something."
She's a weird egg for weird eggs.
"In Australia, it can be hard to find your audience. We do have a tall poppy syndrome. Anyone who is overtly weird in obvious ways can have a hard time," she says.
Fraser got into comedy as a hobby while studying law in the UK. She did it mainly because she was bad at it and wanted to see if she could be good at it.
"Up until that point, I'd always been led at things I was good at; I just thought that wasn't a good way to be. What's interesting about life is doing hard things. So, I don't have any stakes in stand-up if I'm not good at it. You don't get good at stand-up without failing a lot," she says.
Fraser became interested in the process of getting better by failing. Now when she performs she has no imposter syndrome because she knows how bad she was and how hard she worked to get as good as she is.
"It's not a magic thing where you think you have a talent for it. I slogged my times in the open mics. I know how a joke works. I know the mechanics of making something funny," she says.
She became a lawyer and hated working for a large corporate firm. Then while applying for PhDs she continued to do comedy. She found stand-up was the one consistency in her life when everything else was in flux, whether her mum was sick or her grandmother died.
"Stand-up was the thing I kept coming back to," Fraser says.
Now she's excited to come back to Newcastle, as she's performed here a few times in the past.
