Giving it a Shot - Urzila Carlson
Urzila Carlson doesn’t believe in wasting opportunities. So much so that when a former workmate signed her up for an open mic stand-up comedy night – despite not having any experience or interest in the industry – the South African born New Zealander decided to give it a shot.
“I used to work in advertising as a graphic designer, but I was always cracking people up with comments I would make up in the office, and one of the copywriters, Leon, was like, ‘You have to go do stand-up, you’re so funny’,” she said.
“When I was leaving to go to a different agency, Leon organised as the leaving gift a coffee machine and this fake contract to go do an open mic night.
“I had honestly never even been to a stand-up comedy gig in my life at that point, but I went, and I did it. It was a five-minute slot, so I wrote four minutes of funny stuff to give the audience a minute to laugh; that’s how arrogant I was in the beginning!
“I did the one time, and I said, ‘That was it.’ It was the scariest thing I had ever done. The next day I got a call to say that I was through to the next round because what we hadn’t realised was that Leon had entered me into this ‘raw quest’ during the comedy festival where they look for new talent.
“I said to the owner of the club, ‘Oh, shit no. I don’t want to do that. I’m already crushing it; I’ve got a great job. Give it to someone who’s interested in comedy’.
“But he said, ‘It’s a great opportunity, you should come back and do it again’.
“And because I don’t believe in letting opportunities slip through your fingers – I think if an opportunity comes up, you should take it because I don’t believe in living with regret – so I did it.
“I didn’t tell anyone, not even Leon. I went back, did it again and then that year I won the Best Newcomer award and it just kind of took off from there.”
That was in 2008 - and Carlson has gone from strength to strength since then to become a household name and multi-award-winning comedian. She has won everything from the 2019 Rielly Comedy Award by the Variety Artists Club of New Zealand to the 2017 Sydney Comedy Festival’s Director’s Choice Award, while also being named the New Zealand Comedy Guild’s Best Female Comedian six times.
She scored the coveted People’s Choice Award at the New Zealand International Comedy Festival two years in a row and was a nominee for Australia’s 2018 Helpmann Award for Best Comedy Performer.
Carlson is also a much-loved series regular on Network Ten’s smash-hit panel show, Have You Been Paying Attention?! in Australia, as well as New Zealand’s edition of the show, and was a key cast member on fellow comedian Nazeem Hussain’s flagship show, Orange Is The New Brown in Australia in 2018.
She had a blistering year in 2019, which saw her NETFLIX debut as one of 47 comedians handpicked from around the world to become part of the streaming service’s unprecedented stand-up comedy event series. Carlson followed that up in 2020 with the release of her first solo full hour NETFLIX special, Overqualified Loser, which she recorded in Melbourne at the end of 2019.
She has regularly sold out her seasons in Australia and New Zealand over the years and was the 2019 Melbourne International Comedy Festival’s highest ticket-seller, which secured her the People’s Choice Award.
While making a dramatic career change in her early 30s might have seemed pretty daunting at the time, Carlson has clearly never looked back.
“When I got into it, I didn’t know how many different facets there were to comedy. I thought if you’re a stand-up, that’s what you did. You stood on stage and told some jokes,” she said.
“But I’ve since learned there’s a heap more, you can do writing for movies, or sometimes I get a script, and they go, ‘Can you make this character funny?’ There are so many other things you can do within the industry.
“And I love 99% of it. But the one thing that is head and shoulders above the rest is live stand-up gigs. I love it. And whether it’s in a pub with 20 people, or whether it’s in a theatre with 5,500 people, if it’s live stand-up, I am in my absolute element.
“That is my favourite thing to do in the world, and I love it even though I get terrible stage fright.
“That walk from the side of the stage to the microphone is the longest walk in the history of man. When I’m standing side of stage and my music starts playing for me to go on, and usually, my stage manager or my tour manager will intro
me, and when it gets to that point when now I have to get ready to walk out on stage I always think, ‘Why the f**k am I doing this? I can go back to advertising. I’ve got other skills. I don’t need to put myself through this horror’.
“But then the minute I touch that microphone, and I start talking, and they start laughing, I’m like, ‘I’m home. This is the best place to be in the entire world’.
“I love it; I don’t question the decision to change careers for a second. It’s just amazing.”
Carlson does question plenty of other things in life, though, which often becomes the basis of material for her next stand-up show.
This was certainly the case in 2016 when she started exploring questions around her background and ancestry.
“I did a DNA test, you know, those ancestry things, and when I got the results, I’m like, ‘I’m going to have to do a show about this,’ because I was completely blown away,” Carlson said.
“Because my mum grew up in foster care, we had no idea of our make-up of the family. So I did the ancestry thing, and it was quite revealing. And I was like, oh, this is great. I’m going to do a show about it.
“I lived in the States before, and when I was getting my driver’s licence, someone had said to put where you’re from, and I said, ‘African’ and they wouldn’t put it on my driver’s licence because it didn’t fit the description. And I was like, ‘But I am African’.
“And so this was the whole thing, what am I? We’ve got this great saying in Afrikaans, which means you’re neither flesh nor meat. You’re sort of not sure where you fit in.
“So then when I got the ancestry results back, I was like, okay, now I know precisely my genetic make-up, but I don’t think it changes anything. So I wrote a show about it two years ago, and I toured the show through New Zealand, and it’s been pretty well received.
“I think anyone who has ever met an immigrant or is an immigrant would relate to it, or if you’re not sure where you’re from.”
The show is Token African, which Carlson intended to bring to Australia last year before COVID-19 brought everyone’s lives to a virtual standstill.
With restrictions easing and live performances now back on the agenda, Carlson is preparing for a 10-city tour across Australia with Token African, kicking off with a three-night Brisbane season from May 3 before heading south to bring her quick-witted brand of comedy to the Newcastle Civic Theatre stage on May 14 and 15.
As you’d expect from an award-winning comedian, the promo blurb for the show asks as many questions as it answers:
“Africans have become the new must-have accessory. Okay, not really, but everyone knows one, works with one or has a sister dating one of us. What makes you African? Is it enough that you’re born there? Do you need to be able to dance?
Why does being South African not register as African in most places? You’re thinking about it right now, aren’t you? Questioning it. Africa changes people. People who visit game reserves wear ranger outfits... why is that? We don’t wear scrubs when going to the doctor... Africa puts things in perspective; this show will help you find that focus, delivered to you by a Token African.”
Despite the light-hearted description, Carlson said the show also touches on some more serious topics, albeit via her trademark deadpan humour and cheeky wit.
“I always try and sneak a little something into every show because I just feel that if I get to talk to thousands of people every year, I may as well send something out into the world that’s more than just a bit of noise,” Carlson said.
“So the show is about how we identify and how important it is to have your own voice and to see that voice represented around.
“My initial reaction when I got the ancestry results was disappointment. I was disappointed, and I was really surprised by that, because I thought that’s just sort of my blood basically, it’s not who I am as a person.
“It gives you a breakdown, percentage-wise, of where you are from in the world, so I go into that a bit in the show, and just my surprise of discovering who I am genetically.”
While COVID-19 delayed her initial plans for the Token African tour, it did open up plenty of other opportunities for Carlson, including a stint on the Australian reality TV program The Masked Singer during 2020. Chosen as a replacement for American actress Lindsay Lohan, Carlson was tasked with the challenge of trying to guess the identities of the celebrities inside bizarre costumes, battling it out alongside returning panellists Dave Hughes, Dannii Minogue and radio host Jackie O.
The eight-week shoot in Melbourne from August last year coincided with the Victorian capital moving into a stage four lockdown after a serious increase in community cases of COVID-19.
Between this experience, the initial restrictions brought in earlier in the year when she was in New Zealand, and two stints in hotel quarantine in Sydney and Auckland, Carlson spent 11 weeks of 2020 in lockdown.
Rather than waste the enforced time-out from touring, Carlson turned it into an opportunity to pursue another comedic platform she’d always wanted to explore but never had the time to invest in – creating her own podcast.
Titled That’s Enough Already, Carlson uses it to explore the seemingly endless topic of the things that annoy her and her guests, who just happen to be some of the funniest comedians from Australia, New Zealand and beyond.
“I think if you spend 11 weeks in quarantine, you have some time to think about (what annoys you),” Carlson said.
“I used to say I don’t have any time for a podcast, but then because of COVID, I discovered I do have time now. And I thought, I’ve got access to all these amazing friends, and people that I know who are as frustrated as I am about stuff, so I decided to do a podcast about what shits us, just everything that does your head in.
“There’s been quite a few takers in the ‘what shits you the best’ category. I think I’ve pre-recorded 13 episodes, and as I’m meeting people now, I go, ‘You should come and do the podcast,’ and the list just keeps growing and growing.”
So far, the episodes have included everything from Nazeem Hussain talking about eating yoghurt in bed to Dannii Minogue and Jackie O discussing working on The Masked Singer, internet trolls, car park thieves and people chewing.
Australia’s Julia Morris, New Zealand actor and comedian Rhys Darby, UK comedian Russell Howard and Chinese-born comedian Ronny Chieng round out the episodes released so far on the podcast, which quickly shot to the top of the comedy charts in Australia and New Zealand following its launch in March.
Carlson said creating the podcast had been a fantastic experience, especially given the laidback, casual vibe that had come from basically being able to just interview her friends.
“When I’m doing the podcast, I’m just chatting... every single person so far that I’ve chatted to is a mate,” she said.
“It’s literally just me catching up with mates and going, ‘So what shits you?’ And then we just chat about it. So it’s basically just me having a Zoom catch-up, and I’m recording it.
“It’s very, very relaxed. I almost want people to feel like they’re just listening in on two mates chatting because that’s exactly what it is.
“I’m actually doing my editor’s mind in because I was supposed to keep it between 20 and 30 minutes, and so far, the majority of them have been over an hour-and-a-half. The one that I’m releasing soon, Sam Pang, we’re going to have to release two eps for that because we recorded for so long that we couldn’t cut it down to just 30 minutes.
“When we start chatting because you know the other person so well, you’re like, ‘Ah, here we go.’ He bought a whole list of like 50,000 things that shit him to death, and then you kind of go, ‘Oh my god, every single one of them shits me too’.
“I’m surprised how many things actually just shit me. People say something, and you go, ‘Yeah, me too. I never even thought about it, but yeah, I hate craft fairs too’. And then it just kind of goes off from there.”
That’s Enough Already with Urzila Carlson is available online and via the various podcasting apps. Token African will hit the stage at Newcastle’s Civic Theatre on May 14 and 15, with tickets available via www.civictheatrenewcastle.com.au
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