2019 Festival of Open Minds, Alasdair Tremblay-Birchall
Episode 19, Dec 13, 2019, 10:50 PM
Alasdair Tremblay-Birchall spent his teenage years in Tathra and went to uni to become an engineer.
After working in the industry for a few years, he decided to swap steady, profitable work for life as a comedian, creating his first Melbourne Comedy Festival show in 2013 – and he hasn’t stopped since.
And the secret to having a show at a comedy festival? “I’ll tell you the secret,” Alasdair says, lowering his voice, “it is unbelievably easy. You have to be able to come up with $550 to register plus pay your nightly venue hire. So the secret is that you have to take a financial risk and be stable of nerve.”
In his 2019 Comedy Festival show, 'Magma' with collaborator Andy Matthews, Alasdair and Andy returned to their engineering roots, giving a fake presentation on how mining magma will solve all the world’s problems.
Even if you’ve never seen Alastair’s work, you’ve likely been exposed to his gags. In between stand-up shows, he works behind the scenes writing jokes for television shows like Shaun Micallef’s ‘Mad as Hell’ and ‘Talking About Your Generation’.
“I treat it like any other job, like being a plumber,” Alasdair says of his television work. “The only thing is that I’m trying to unclog society.”
But there’s no such thing as a steady paycheck and Alasdair has had to get used to “scary gaps” in between bouts of work.
Still, Alasdair wishes he’d known 10 years ago that “anybody can do this if they want to. You learn how to do it from watching other people who are good at it and you start to understand how jokes are made and you can trick the human brain into laughing.”
But it’s not without a lot of self-reflection that successful comedians are made.
“You have to accept it when a joke is not working and kill it until eventually, you have 5-10 minutes of content that does work.”
Alasdair brought laughs and added insight to a deep and dynamic day at the Festival of Open Minds.
Click play to learn more about his trade, talent and ticker...
After working in the industry for a few years, he decided to swap steady, profitable work for life as a comedian, creating his first Melbourne Comedy Festival show in 2013 – and he hasn’t stopped since.
And the secret to having a show at a comedy festival? “I’ll tell you the secret,” Alasdair says, lowering his voice, “it is unbelievably easy. You have to be able to come up with $550 to register plus pay your nightly venue hire. So the secret is that you have to take a financial risk and be stable of nerve.”
In his 2019 Comedy Festival show, 'Magma' with collaborator Andy Matthews, Alasdair and Andy returned to their engineering roots, giving a fake presentation on how mining magma will solve all the world’s problems.
Even if you’ve never seen Alastair’s work, you’ve likely been exposed to his gags. In between stand-up shows, he works behind the scenes writing jokes for television shows like Shaun Micallef’s ‘Mad as Hell’ and ‘Talking About Your Generation’.
“I treat it like any other job, like being a plumber,” Alasdair says of his television work. “The only thing is that I’m trying to unclog society.”
But there’s no such thing as a steady paycheck and Alasdair has had to get used to “scary gaps” in between bouts of work.
Still, Alasdair wishes he’d known 10 years ago that “anybody can do this if they want to. You learn how to do it from watching other people who are good at it and you start to understand how jokes are made and you can trick the human brain into laughing.”
But it’s not without a lot of self-reflection that successful comedians are made.
“You have to accept it when a joke is not working and kill it until eventually, you have 5-10 minutes of content that does work.”
Alasdair brought laughs and added insight to a deep and dynamic day at the Festival of Open Minds.
Click play to learn more about his trade, talent and ticker...