Adelaide Fringe

Interview: Ange Lavoipierre – Award Winning Comedian Has Problems: 99 Of Them

I’m not sure about you, but for me, not a day goes by where I don’t run into some sort of problem. Standup comedian and journalist Ange Lavoipierre has 99 problems, and for this year’s Adelaide Fringe she will be presenting an exhaustive list of them.

Ange Lavoipierre is an award winning comedian and journalist, who until last year co-hosted ABC’s The Signal. Ange won the Best Comedy Weekly Fringe Awards consecutively in 2019 and 2020 and has performed her shows globally to critical acclaim.

Ange and I recently caught up to have a chat about her career and the show she will be bringing to Adelaide. With comedy and journalism being very different career paths, I was keen to hear why Ange chose them both as careers.

“They are two very different career paths that I’ve gone down. Journalism was certainly deliberate and comedy…that was somewhat of an accident. My job was very serious – I started being a journalist when I was 19 and at one point, a friend of mine asked me to improvise a cello soundtrack for their comedy duo, as I’m also a cellist. So, I started playing music on a very, very serious instrument for these improvised comedy shows. I started touring to all of these comedy festivals and got to see comedy up close. At the time I thought I had stage fright, which is absurd now because it’s one of those things you tell yourself you have and it turns out not to be the case, but I was launched into the comedy world by accident and I thought to myself that I could actually do stand up. I then started to talk on stage, rather than just play the cello and here I am still doing that.”

Comedy and journalism, whilst there may at times be similarities between them, are two very different career paths to take. Does Ange have a preferred format?

“That’s like asking if you prefer a dessert or a main course. It depends. This year I am spending more time and energy on live performance. Like a lot of performers, I’ve felt pretty starved of it the past couple of years. Also, I am taking a little side step away from journalism and stepping into comedy. There is something that you get out of being on stage you just don’t get from being in a studio. It’s totally addictive and there is nothing quite like it. I do love them both, but at this point of time, all I want to do is be on stage.”

When creating a new show, some comedians draw from the news, their lives, encounters. But for Ange, it’s a very different medium.

“I live and die by the notes section in my phone. It’s jammed full of lots of random things that at the time don’t seem to make sense, but it’s full of stuff I thought was funny as I was going about my day. If I open my notes section now, the first note currently says “have a nice life, die in your sleep’. I have no idea what that means, but I knew at the time it was an idea I thought I could unpack. It’s full of fragmented thoughts that I go back through when I want to write.”

Even though the vast majority of comedians spend considerable amounts of time scripting their shows, it’s very easy to go ‘off script’ if the audience responds to different jokes than you thought they might.

“You are there in the room with those specific people and no two audiences are the same. If you try to pretend that all audiences are the same then you are doing them a disservice. You need to react to the audience because they are reacting to you. It can be difficult because most stand-ups have a script that months of work has gone into and so it can feel a little wrong to veer off that script, but sometimes that is what you need to do just being in the room with people.”

Ange will be in Adelaide very shortly for a few weeks with her show Ive Got 99 Problems And Heres An Exhaustive List Of Them.

“The tag line for this show really sums it up. “99 problems. 50 minutes. 3000 seconds. 1 woman. 1 spider suit. 30 seconds per problem”. The broader theme with the show is about magical thinking, losing your mind, and trying to work out what is real and what is not. So, through this show I’m trying to work out why spiders are trying to follow me.”

Ange Lavoipierre’s Ive Got 99 Problems And Heres An Exhaustive List Of Them will be performed at The Piglet in Gluttony, between February 18 and 27 at 9.30pm. Tickets available through FringeTix or at https://adelaidefringe.com.au/fringetix/ange-lavoipierre-i-ve-got-99-problems-and-here-is-an-exhaustive-list-of-them-af2022

Interview by Ben Stefanoff

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