Stretching herself across stand-up comedy tours, writing for TVNZ and regularly appearing on Australian and New Zealand shows such as ‘Have You Been Paying Attention?’, Melanie Bracewell has no plans of slowing down.
“My attitude is that I’m 24, I’m still young, I can kind of get away with being stupidly busy by doing 100 different things at once, and then once I reach the point of being old and feeble and not being able to do everything, then I will specialise,” Melanie laughs. Although she’s young, Melanie has taken to the comedy world like a fish to water, building a series of accolades and awards in just a few years, but she wasn’t always aware it was even a career option.
“I loved comedy and I’ve watched a lot – my dad would force me to watch comedy that I ended up liking,” she remembers, “but I don’t think I ever thought it was an actual job, it was just one of those unobtainable things you don’t even realise actually exists, like something out of another world.”
“It wasn’t until I started Uni and made friends with a couple of comedians from New Zealand that I realised ‘oh, you guys are real people, that’s really weird’.”
Now Melanie is one of those people, performing stand-up and currently working on a story and script for ‘Wellington Paranormal’, a New Zealand mockumentary series following a team of innocuous police officers investigating paranormal phenomena.
“(Working on) that show is so great because there’s so many jokes, it’s like right, write a bunch of jokes and then mesh it all together and put some scary monster in there and you’re kind of done,” she says.
On Australian screens, Melanie appears regularly on ‘Have You Been Paying Attention?’, the Channel 10 comedy quiz show pitting comedians against each other to test their knowledge of the week’s news headlines.
While she keeps up with the wit and banter on the show, it’s a notable change of pace from scriptwriting or a well-prepared stand-up act.
“It’s very stressful for me, but the stress makes it more satisfying for me to go ‘I thought of that immediately and it got a laugh’ rather than ‘this took me months and months and months, it should get a laugh’.”
Switching between New Zealand and Australian audiences can also be tricky at times, as Melanie has found not all our references mean the same thing.
“It’s quite a common thing in New Zealand to call someone who’s more of a snitch, we call them narcs here, we just call everyone who snitches on anything a narc, and my Australian manager was like ‘no, that’s specifically drug-related’,” Melanie says, realising “so that’s why when I called my five-year-old niece a narc, people were like ‘what?’”
Some things are universal though, such as the dating scene, which is a constant source of relatable material for Melanie’s stand-up. But not all dates are worth talking about on stage.
“I’ve met with regular people who go ‘now I’m going to end up in one of your stand-up acts’, but you haven’t done anything funny yet, all you’ve done is referenced that I might talk about you,” she says, “you’ve got to do something horrible or funny or embarrassing.”
While Melanie’s humour is centred on observations of her own life, she has found her shows tend to draw in all demographics.
“I’m always surprised because the people I attract are so diverse, I didn’t realise really old couples like to come to my show,” Melanie says, “and I ask, ‘do you get it, do you understand the vibe?’ – ‘yeah yeah, we were young too once,’ and then I feel like a dick.”
Melanie Bracewell Tour Dates
17-22 March – Brisbane Powerhouse (Brisbane Comedy Festival)21 March – Home Of The Arts (Gold Coast Laughs Festival)
26 March-19 April – Melbourne Town Hall (Melbourne International Comedy Festival)
8 May – Comedy Lounge (Perth Comedy Festival)
14-15 May – The Comedy Store (Sydney Comedy Festival)
