laughing through gritted teeth: anger and catharsis at Melbourne International Comedy Festival 2026

A new(ish) trend in confessional standup emerged at MICF this year: pissed-off comedy. Featuring Kate Dehnert’s ‘Echo’, Tom Cashman's 'NPC', and others (a little bit of 'Hacks'.

“Anger is better—there is a presence in anger.”

Toni Morisson, The Bluest Eye

After this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival ended, I started watching the final season of Hacks: the Emmy-award winning series about fictional comedian, Deborah Vance (Jean Smart). Across four seasons (two of them good), creators Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky have made Vance don every trend in comedy’s recent history: the Nanette turn, the ‘anti-woke’ comic, the confessional comic, the corporate sell out.

Vance has been cancelled at a university campus; she’s ranted loudly (and often) about political correctness. In Season Two she traded in her Vegas-showgirl style stand up for a comedy special that was explicitly personal and explicitly feminist. In the most recent episode for this season, she tries her hand at another emerging trend: being pissed-off.

Vance has always had the irritable airs of any first-rate diva, and her audience repartee has often drawn on the brash stylings of the insult comic. But this season, a court-enforced gag order and a TV executive eager to erase her has pissed her anger off even more. She begins the fourth episode trying to turn her personal rage into stand up. The result is an unfunny rant about how repressed she is, delivered next to a poster that puts her above Rosa Parks in a ‘persecution pyramid’. Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbeinder) compares it to a ‘Smith college commencement address’. This display of anger is solipsistic: a scream from a friend you watch cautiously, rather than one you join in on. Her spitefulness builds over the course of the episode until she’s yelling about her dead ex-husband at a commemorative dinner. It’s not just a solipsistic rage, it’s a doomed one—an anger that gives its subject the illusion of catharsis, but none of its sweaty reality. From an audience’s perspective, it’s the equivalent of watching someone rage bait themselves: funny, but pitiable. In the end Vance decides that she shouldn’t be angry at all. The episode finishes offering up a limp resolution: she ‘just has to be funny’.

Thankfully, this year’s International Melbourne Comedy Festival makes a more interesting argument that we should be both. I saw a measly fourteen shows out of the record-breaking 650 on offer this year, but what I did see was at least a little bit interested in anger: how it relates to comedy, how it can be performed, what it can say. Rather than resolving anger with laughter, the best shows sought out creative ways for them to co-exist. This isn’t insult comedy, or whatever Larry David’s curmudgeon schtick is called. It’s a confessional style with all the brash explosiveness of a Roast with less of the cruelty. At this year’s festival it was everywhere: Reuben Kaye turned our frustrations into theatrical spectacle; Kate Dehnert turned her anger at an ex into an anger we could share; and Elouise Eftos made an angry audience her best asset. These shows—and others like them—proposed a red-hot version of catharsis not contingent on closure; collective anger, without the need for resolution. If this year’s festival had a tagline, it’d be ‘laughter through gritted teeth’.

You can see what Hacks is trying to say by making Vance move past her anger. After years of comedy needing to ‘say something’ or ‘mean something’ to be valuable, her conclusion places her squarely in the global return to comedy that is ‘just funny’. I wrote about this last year: a revitalisation of comedy’s ‘comedy’, one that has shed the self-seriousness of the 2010s when art became a moral good first and a mode of representation second. It’s no surprise that there has been a resurgence of absurdist comedy led by comedians like Sarah Squrim, Julio Torress, Patti Harrison and Tim Robinson (closer to home: Alex Hines and Sarah Stattford, Hot Department, old faithful Aunty Donna) and clowning (Hannah Camillieri, Elf Lyons, Caitlin Duff, Sunny Youngsmith). These are comedians who share an interest in fucking around with form in ways that are complementary to content but not necessarily determined by it. The popularity they’ve managed to achieve underlines the appeal: no matter how serious their content might be, formally they appear not to take themselves too seriously. ‘Somehow, this shitty world feels goofier in a comedy show like this’…

‘[J]udiciously used silliness’ is the phrase critic Daniel Herborn offered in his review of this year’s festival for The Saturday Paper, before singling out shows that favoured ‘more escapist physical comedy’. He cites Hannah Gasby’s low-stakes show The Evening Muse, Mel McGlensey’s Mel McGlensey Is Normal and Tricksy Collins’ Assigned Magician at Birth, among others. Gordon is right: across the festival, silliness reigned (I’d add Hannah Camilleri’s Dinner Hannah Show, Handful Of Bugs’s Hello Mr Radio! to his list). It’s not a new trend. We’ve had the influx of ‘Nanette turns’: political (but often self-serious) standup. And we’ve had the reaction against the influx of ‘Nanette turns’ with this surge of less explicitly political clowning, absurdism, absurdist clowning, and meta-confessional stand up.

So now, in this supposedly post-post-Nanette world, a comedian trying to write a show faces a dilemma: choose a self-serious confessional style and you risk allegations of being cliché and derivative; make unserious, impersonal work and you risk appearing, as Gordon neatly illustrates, ‘escapist’ and apolitical. A 2026 audience no longer wants honey-coloured escapist optimism because the catharsis it offers feels too idealistic. But they also don’t want didactic political art because its absolutism has also started to feel unhelpfully unreal. The rage-led confessional style emerging this festival is what we want. Or, at least, it registers the rage and frustration of not really knowing what we want from culture right now.

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kate dehnert’s echo and anger as style

Five minutes into my favourite show this year, Echo, and comedian Kate Dehnert is screaming at the top of her lungs. It’s a ‘breakup show’, she tells us, yelling (again) to be heard above the hard thud of a techno track. I’m one of maybe thirty people packed into the backroom at Theory Bar. There’s no stage, just Dehnert in jeans and a t-shirt gritting her teeth and fist bumping wildly in the air as the techno beat gets louder.

Artists making art out of their breakups is a tradition as old as time. Generally, there are three options for anyone wanting to add their heartbreak to the storied genre: get angry (Beyonce), get petty (Lily Allen), or be above it all (Adele). Dehnert does all three. Intensely personal and unflinching in its honesty, pettiness and rage, Echo is a show that draws on the logic of comedy-writing to question the notions of catharsis we associate with confessional standup through the tropes of breakup art: who gets it, how do they get it, and to what end?

For fifty minutes, Dehnert swings from pissed-off to petty, livid to frustrated; mischievously mad, to gut-wrenchingly angry. Every formal choice she makes coheres around various versions of her fury. There are the rave beats, the hard cuts between sheer lighting (blood red or a rich blue). She delivers much of the show red-faced from her fist-pumping raves, straining to be heard over those loud beats, and firing off punchlines and dark anecdotes with the same explosive energy. Anger is a stylistic vision and a guiding ethos in one.

In Nanette (last reference, promise) the problem Hannah Gadsby raised was to do with comedy’s use of ‘tension’: how it is constructed and when it is released. Early on in Echo and Dehnert tells us why she’s refused to resolve her anger, or make a show that turns rage into something that feels more positive. Mid-fist pump, she tells us her overarching thesis: ‘the high road is paved with women’s bodies’. The point is similar to Gadsby’s: a critique of who we ask to release tension. Specifically, why it so often falls at the feet of women. After angrily telling us the asshole things her asshole ex did (cheating, victim-blaming, being a bad standup and even worse fuck boy at Edinburgh Fringe), Dehnert gives us an example by way of a story about running into him on a street in London. She’s angry at him, and deeply depressed. But she doesn’t show it. Instead, she listens to him demand sympathy for his problems. Her point is clear: the ‘high road’ of non-anger is weaponised to demonise women’s anger and force them into positions of care that, behind terms like ‘maturity’ and ‘emotional intelligence’, simply represent men asking for less (or quieter) accountability. Her stylistic commitment to anger consequently becomes less about the catharsis of closure, but the spectacle of leaning into it as a form of self-determination. A small remote in her hands controls the lights, the music, the soundbites. Echo’s angry style becomes a testament to personal agency; the power of choosing not to bury the hatchet and the value of using artistic spectacle to sharpen it to a point.

So Dehnert stays pissed-off and fist-bumping throughout the show. But like most comedians, she knows that tension is not a simple switch one turns on with a set up and off with a punchline. There are different levels of tension in any one joke, set up, or story. It’s true that Dehnert refuses to resolve her anger, but she does release the tension of parts of it. Her seemingly unbridled and emotive delivery belies a nuanced control of tension that is ultimately a control of catharsis: ours, and hers. There’s the whispering ghost of Grecian past, Aristotle reminding us that catharsis is an experience of purification that purges the negative vibes of Tragedy through pity and fear we can control. In The Catharsis of Comedy (1994), theorist Dana F. Sutton brings this into our understanding of comedy by lingering on a truism: sometimes we laugh at what is most tragic. That laughter, Sutton argues, takes the negative (the tragic) and transforms it into something positive. This transformation is a problem when a comedian doesn’t want to resolve the negativity of an experience.

Dehnert does not make her breakup ‘positive’ by mining it for comedy. Instead, she makes laughing at it a way for us to feel that she’s sharing its negativity with us. Laughing at her asshole ex brings us into her anger and incentives our empathy. It’s not pity, or schadenfreude. The kind of empathy we feel is the result of Dehnert’s sensitivity to those negative realities that comedy cannot resolve. She knows, like anyone who has experienced real tragedy, that laughter never really stops the negativity of a negative experience. Laughter helps you live through tragedy, but it doesn’t resolve what is tragic. Dehnert offers an alternative by drawing an implicit parallel between laughing with her and fist bumping at a rave: both experiences that are not only better shared; in fact, they are inevitably shared.

Dehnert’s show was not an outlier. In NPC (Nearly Proficient Comedian), Tom Cashman refused to resolve a heckler’s anger when he was told that they should ‘meet outside’ after the show. He giggled initially. But then he refused to resolve our discomfort at this absurd threat. Instead, he told the man how ridiculous he sounded before making a wry joke at his expense. When the audience laughed, it represented an extension of Tom’s initial anger. Our laughter did not resolve the negative experience (for Tom, or for the ‘vibe’ in Melbourne Town Hall). Laughter underlined the man’s responsibility for these feelings of negativity. We laughed at this man as a way to emphasise that resolving this negativity means less of him and men like him. Across the festival, comedians—from Frankie McNair’s Huge Ass Mindset, Gabbi Bolt’s Small Poppy, Laura Davis’s Swag—turned the catharsis of shared anger, frustration, and rage outward. Bolt’s show ends on an angry phone call with a previous teacher that explicitly solves a decade-long grudge. Laura Davis delivers her set surrounded by placards of angry agitprop protesting underpaid comedians, refusing to be funny at all. Like Dehnert, they all challenged the inward-facing character associated with confessional comedy’s more solipsistic tendencies to shake a fist at the people, systems, and frameworks that make us angry; or, as with Dehnert, police how we express it.

In part 2, I want to dive deeper into the political resonances of this pissed-off brand of comedy.

So, to be continued. Tomorrow.

lmao* xx

*lmao, angrily