Sydney’s Alice Fraser left her life as a corporate lawyer to pursue a career in comedy. This year she’s bringing her new showThe Resistanceto Sydney Comedy Festival to spread the good vibes.
“I think I always knew it wasn’t for me,” says Fraser, pondering her previous career. “But I wanted to give it a proper go, because wouldn’t life be a lot easier if you suddenly realised you loved working in a prestige job in a fancy corporation? I thought there might be a niche for me there, but there definitely wasn’t. I think there were a few moments every day where I thought, ‘That’s it,’ but I was looking at my pay slip and thinking, ‘All I want to buy is that time back.’”
Like many comedians, Fraser’s love of comedy has been with her a long time. “I always loved comedy, but never thought of it as a career,” she says. “I don’t even know if I understood the concept of a comedian being paid, which is good now that I’m actually living that dream. I think being a comedian is less a desire than it is a compulsion.”
It hasn’t always been smooth sailing for Fraser. She’s had a few interesting experiences while performing her craft. “I was in a Law Revue, where at dress rehearsal one of the lead performers showed his penis to a cast member in the stairwell. She was quite traumatised and the executive had to pull him out of the show. That was quite intense, learning parts at the last minute and switching things round.”
Though she’s quite humble about it, Fraser has seen quite a lot of success in her career thus far. “The problem with achievements is once I have them, I immediately dismiss them and start looking for the next thing. I think it mustn’t be that good – after all, they gave it to me, and I’m an idiot. Like the reverse of impostor syndrome, as though the whole world is faking it, which it kind of is.”
For The Resistance, Fraser is taking on a number of themes that hit close to home – “Humanity, houses, childhood, morality, my mash-up Buddhist-Jewish-Catholic upbringing, post-war trauma, sexiness.”
Indeed, Fraser identifies as a feminist, and often discusses sex, vanity and what it means to be sexy. “Sex is funny and messy and intimate and weird,” she laughs. “Packaged and commodified sexiness is trying to make sex serious and worthwhile and important. It’s not. Basically, vanity is dumb, we’re all getting older and dying, and if you pin your identity to something as ephemeral as sex appeal, you’re setting yourself up to fail by your own terms. Worse, if you take your ideas of what’s sexy from something other than your own sex parts and partners, you’re setting yourself up to fail by other people’s terms as well. It’s just dumb… and funny.”
Alice Fraser’s showThe Resistance runs Thursday April 28 – Sunday May 1 at Enmore Theatre, as part of Sydney Comedy Festival 2016.
