Katherine Phelps

With cooking the quality of your ingredients will determine the quality of your resulting product. Similarly in (comic) theatre you must start with good material, good direction, and good performers in order to create a good performance. I sometimes complain how hard it is to get reasonable comedic performances from actors, but I find even […]

I am a great fan of Adam Hills. He is a brilliant comedian and consummate television host. I’ve been enjoying his current show Adam Hills Tonight. On last night’s show he decided to interview a number of people who had been married for a significant length of time. This was meant to be a feel-good […]

I am doing theatrical comedy again this coming Melbourne Fringe Festival. I love making bold casting choices based on both the quality of a comedian’s performance and how interesting their choices are both as a performer and a person. This means I have to spend time with my cast as people BEFORE writing the script […]

Comedy often contains social and political critique. You may be doing it and not even realise. You tell a joke about what dating is like, you end up railing against the stupidity of certain mores, and BANG you are making a social criticism. Courses in rhetoric and philosophical logic are seen as dreadfully old-fashioned, but […]

Professional comedians are endlessly writing material. All comedians take notes whenever they come up with ideas or have experiences worthy of putting to the stage or screen. Some develop these notes by writing out a script. Others start to practise the telling of their anecdotes to friends, family, and comedy compatriots. Everyone benefits from having […]

Last year I taught a course in standup and sketch comedy to an adorable bunch of primary school kids. One of the things that suprised me was their inability to grasp that a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. They understood that stories have characters and events, which are the elements for […]

It pays to keep an eye on the community festivals. Some communities include a wealth of creative people, and attending their festivals can be a way to gain easy access to some topnotch talent. I have been both guest and attendee of the Williamstown Literary Festival for a number of years. Every year I have […]

Why do we like films? Why do we like television series? Why do we like comedy? Two key elements are having the opportunity to observe other people’s lives and to share in other’s emotions. Emotion We are constantly comparing and contrasting ourselves with the people around us and the people we experience in stories, whether […]

I am a great lover of stories and storytelling. I’m happy whether the stories are told in books, on screen, or live by oral storytellers and comedians. My PhD is in storytelling for digital media. At the time I did this the field was virgin territory, so I had the job of digging through story […]

Growing up a Character When I was growing up my family moved town on several occasions. These moves were to small towns, towns that my parents felt would be safer and hold more traditional values than a city. Americans tend to characterise small towns as either places full of dumb hicks or a sort of […]