Jeremy Dooley remembers his first Melbourne International Comedy Festival in 2003.
He was 17 years old, fresh out of high school, and had won the Class Clowns youth comedy competition the previous year as a duo with his school mate, Mario Cicitta. The pair decided to give comedy a serious crack with their own festival show.
“We didn’t know this at the time, but looking back at it, what we did was two kids on stage mucking around,” he laughs. “Some people thought it was endearing and came along. I’m sure it was a horrendous show in terms of quality. We had five minutes we used for Class Clowns, and we stretched it for an hour-long show. It was absurd. But it was a lot of fun.”
After that debut performance, Jeremy put his comedy dreams on hold, pleasing his parents by getting a ‘real job’. After 20 years, the comedy bug has bitten him again, and he returns to the festival with his show ‘No Time For Games’.
In the intervening 20 years, Jeremy has held jobs that likely didn’t align with his parents’ idea of a real job. He has worked as Captain Starlight, a fitness coach, workshop facilitator, and a Mixed-Martial Arts fighter.
“It was this weird thing where, by day, I’d be holding workshops with groups of young men and pulling apart what masculinity is, and getting them to communicate with empathy,” he says. “But then by night, I’d be getting ready to fight in a cage. I was lucky that I was mostly alright, but there was definitely one time where I rocked up at a school with two black eyes and a concussion, which is not a good look at a school. Turns out they don’t like that,” he laughs.
The comedy dream was long behind Jeremy, but the urge to perform returned in 2021 when Jeremy underwent COVID lockdowns in Melbourne.
“My jobs have always been very story-based,” he says. “I was always telling stories to connect with athletes and coaches. I was still cracking jokes in that, so it was almost like scratching the itch for me throughout all those years.
“While sitting down at home during lockdown. . . I had the Jerry Seinfeld show on, ‘Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee’. One of the comedians who was on it said, ‘Comedy is just storytelling, but you end on a laugh’. It just made me stop in my tracks. That was the spark for the fire. It made me wonder if I could do stand-up comedy on my own.”
Since returning to comedy, Jeremy has gone full-force into it, making up for lost time. In that short time, he has toured across Australia, headlined in Portugal and Malta, and performed sell-out runs at the last two Melbourne International Comedy Festivals. It’s this fast rise that is the reason he chose the title for his new show, ‘No Time For Games’.
“There were people who I remember from back in the day who were in Class Clowns or just starting out, and now they’re on TV or headlining big rooms across the country,” he says. “And being in my 30s as well, and in a country where comedy skews younger, I’m just trying to make hay while the sun shines and get on as many stages as possible, and perform to as many people, and try and get my skills up to scratch as quickly as I can.”
Jeremy Dooley plays The Collection Bar (Melbourne International Comedy Festival) 29 March-21 April.
