Bulletin

Issue: July 2005

News

What’s in a joke? Maybe laughably big dollars for tourism

If some of us wonder sometimes what’s in a joke – and to what extremes some people will go to raise a laugh – few of us think much about the supply and demand side of humour.

There are people however who do, among them a diminutive, humour-loving Scot, better-known at La Trobe University as Dr Elspeth Frew, lecturer in Tourism Management and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the School of Sport, Tourism and Hospitality Management.

Not that she doesn’t take her day job seriously, but whenever Dr Frew gets a chance she’s hanging out at after-hours comedy bars – from Melbourne to Edinburgh, anywhere she might catch comedians Bill Bailey (British star of the ABC’s cult television comedy Black Books), Paul McDermott (leading comedian with the Doug Anthony All Stars, currently hosting the ABC show Strictly Dancing), and others of that ilk, between gigs.

Paul McDermott, she’ll tell you, was the very first comedian she ever saw ‘crowd-surfing’ – launching himself into a crowd of fellow-comedians and fans at a comedy bar in Edin-burgh in the early hours one morning during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival – when the Doug Anthony All Stars were ‘still brand new.’

She had the opportunity to remind him of it too – at an invitation-only after-show party, when, she admits, she was ‘still a bit starry-eyed.’

‘I’m over that bit now,’ she says.

Well, maybe, but she’s still tracking comedians and hanging about at comedy festivals, most recently the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, to find out why other people do as she does – travel hundreds or thousands of kilometres to fall about laughing.

What makes comedy festivals click; are they in a category of their own among arts festivals; and is there such a category among travellers as the ‘humour tourist’?

Are there ‘joke junkies’ following the comedy trail from city to city, seeking favourite comedians and well-honed jokes, or perhaps even a more seasoned species, always in search of new talent – comics who’ll make them laugh in ways they’ve never laughed before?

Do 2,000 Sydney-siders travel to Melbourne’s comedy festival for humour they can’t find in Sydney? Do they travel for the comedy alone, or is it the comedy + Federation Square + the Yarra Valley + other attractions – or perhaps for the same reason one visiting English comedian told Dr Frew he does it: because ‘Melbourne is such fun?’

Why did comedy ‘happen’ as it did in Melbourne, where the internationally-lauded Melbourne Festival has been a cultural cornerstone for 18 years, and not in Sydney, which developed its first comedy festival The Big Laugh Comedy Festival, only five years ago, and now has two – The Big Laugh and Cracker, which started this year?

What’s the outlook for the Hobart Comedy Festival – self-appointed ‘smallest cultural event in the world’ – and what makes the world’s ‘three big ones’ – the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and Montreal’s Just for Laughs Festival in Canada, the success they are?

Just posing such questions gives Dr Frew a well-tested excuse to keep laughing, but the answers are potentially serious business – for comedy festival managers, for the comedians, and possibly for the Australian tourist industry.

‘There has been a lot of research about the physical and mental benefits of humour in medicine, social psychology and philosophy, and a lot in the leisure industry, but as far as I know no-one has looked at formal humour in the context of festival management,’ says Dr Frew.

‘All the festival people I’ve talked to refer to strong support from their local councils, so if we can establish that humour itself is a principal factor in bringing people into a city, there is very good reason for local governments, for instance, to think about developing comedy festivals as significant tourist attractions.’

Dr Frew started her search for the ‘humour tourist’ with a pilot study of the Craic Irish music and comedy festival at Mount Buller last March. She is now interviewing festival directors and audience samples of the Melbourne, Hobart and Sydney festivals, and aims to extend her research internationally to the Edinburgh and Montreal festivals.

She says there’s also an accelerating interest in ‘comedy sites’, such as those in New York visited by Kramer’s Reality Tours, a tourism spin-off from the TV sitcom Seinfeld: further evidence perhaps of the potential for a whole new dimension to tourism – first the adventure tourist, then the eco-tourist, now the humour tourist.

Dr Frew’s research has been funded to date by a small grant from the Faculty of Law and Management. She is seeking to confirm her conceptual premise – the existence of the ‘humour tourist’ – before seeking further funds to develop the research to its next stage.

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