After emerging from Adelaide as a teenage stand-up wunderkind, Demi Lardner has spent the first part of her 20s making a name for herself in her new home of Melbourne.
In that time, she’s been on both the giving and receiving ends of advice – plenty good, but even more bad. “The worst advice that I’ve been given recently is that you can clean your toilet using Coke,” says Lardner. “That is such bullshit! I tried it, and now my bathroom just smells of Coke. There is absolutely nothing behind it – all those ‘life hack’ websites telling you about it can go get fucked!”
The quirky comic is throwing every last bit of advice that she’s accumulated over the years – for better and for worse – into her latest hour of stand-up, Life Mechanic, a follow-up to her debut Birds With Human Lips. Debuting her show recently at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival before its upcoming visit to Sydney, Lardner says the origins of the idea were entirely circumstantial.
“It’s something that I just fell into, really,” she says. “I give great terrible advice, I think. I just seem to give everyone the best advice that I would never take myself. Half of the show is some slightly decent advice, and the rest of it will be the kind of shit that will get you into far more trouble than you should. It’s very misguided, but it’s knowingly misguided.”
Lardner has had ample opportunity to dish out all kinds of advice on her podcast, We Are Not Doctors, which she co-hosts with her fellow fearless weirdo (and housemate) Bart Freebairn. Across the course of roughly half an hour, Lardner and Freebairn riff on one another’s life events, answer listener questions and even share bits and bobs of philosophy – Lardner herself has a segment in the show entitled Demi Has The Wisdom, in which she waxes lyrical on whatever topic may come to hand.
“Doing the podcast has actually been the best practice for this show,” she says. “I’ve gotten a lot of material out of it, just from the back-and-forth between Bart and myself. He’s obviously way more experienced than me, and he’s been doing it for such a long time. He’s been one of my best friends in comedy ever since I started out – he hosted my second-ever gig, actually. Living together, as well, makes it super easy to put together – we can just venture into the lounge room and knock one out whenever we please.”
Lardner is now making plans for the rest of the year, with hopes to further tour Life Mechanic and get her advice out there on a global scale. “I’m hoping to do Edinburgh Fringe again this year,” she says. “I’ve been really enjoying the process of this show. Every other year that I’ve been doing comedy, I’ve been simply too stressed to actually properly enjoy it. I’ve stressed so much, it’s given me ulcers. With this show, I just want to keep on doing it for as long as possible.”
Demi Lardner‘sLife Mechanic is on at Enmore Theatre, as part of the Sydney Comedy Festival 2016,Thursday April 28 – Sunday May.
