still laughing through gritted teeth: MICF 2026 part 2
the politics of laughing in anger at Reuben Kaye’s 'Hard To Swallow' and Elouise Eftos’s 'Aphrodite'
raging politics
‘For many, the hallmark of our moment is a building sense of frustrated exasperation,’ writes Jonathan Green in his editorial statement for Meanjin’s March 2022 issue, ‘Why Not Anger?’ Sometimes I wonder if the desire to find the perfect word for what it ‘feels’ like to be alive today is just an escapist pursuit – the longing for nomological clarity that compromises metabolising why we feel the way we do. But then again, ‘frustrated exasperation’ sounds about right. As a term, it at least names the interrupted nature of our collective anger; that daily sense of rage frustrated and unresolved. The emotional register of contemporary politics is anger stuck in perpetual suspension.
This exasperation is partly the result of how hard it is to affix our shared frustrations onto a clear object. This is not to say there isn’t plenty to be angry about, but that part of what keeps our anger in this endless failure-to-launch is that its causes share a characteristic slipperiness: obfuscated by the very people who are doing the rage-making things, or our pessimism that being angry at them is pointless and ineffectual. Our anger hasn’t gone, we’re just suspicious about how we should express it and what that expression can materially accomplish. With clear causes for anger but nowhere to put it, our rage drifts: energetic, but directionless. The only object that remains is ourselves. The false catharsis of online rage-bait hinges on this effect. Twitter (fuck X) is still the best at making a spectacle of this solipsistic mode of anger. ‘I am angry at _____’ transforms into the object-less, self-importance of ‘I am angry’; ‘I am frustrated’.
A clip of John Mulaney doing standup at the Hollywood Bowl is currently going viral. In the short video, he calls Robert F. Kennedy a ‘comedy adjacent’ hack before saying he shouldn’t be in politics but should get a ‘hundred more diseases’. It’s mean (<3). You can feel the crowd bristle initially. But soon enough and laughter builds, propelled by the particular momentum that comes when ‘frustrated exasperation’ (in this instance, at a Republican party dedicated to giving underqualified nepo babies high-powered positions) finds a target. Suddenly, that diffuse sense of anger coalesces into clear-eyed fury. Even better: it turns into an anger you can express together through laughter.
That’s the other side of our online lives, too: the co-existence of anger and comedy that has found its most viable political form in the use of parody and irony on Twitter. ‘We are all Charlie Kirk’ went viral partly because it offered a concrete way to express diffuse and inexpressible frustrations. Often, it is anger that propels these darkly ironic moments. The fact that they are the closest we come to a contemporary monoculture tells you just how much we crave anger that is expressible.
Comedians like Mulaney are leaning into this model of anger and reimagining its self-interest by mediating it through the collective experience implicit to their medium, and the more personal character of in-person standup. The ‘pissed-off’ confessional comedy that emerged at Melbourne International Comedy Festival this year goes further. This trend gives us an object around which we can focus these collective frustrations. But it is the innate intimacy of confessional comedy’s autobiographical style that amplifies the capacity for anger to connect us. Anger becomes a collective experience when it is mediated through a laughing crowd, all the more so when our laughter is spurred by knowledge of someone else’s personal frustrations. ‘I am angry’ makes you think about how angry you are. Laughing about shit that makes you angry with someone who shares that anger connects you to them. So a logic emerges: laughter signals a funny punchline as well as the fact that the anger driving it is shared. “Somehow, anger feels like solidarity in a place like this. Haha. Ha”
It’s no wonder, then, that the cabaret King himself, Reuben Kaye; and ‘Australia’s First Attractive Comedian’, Elouise Eftos, both ended their shows at MICF this year with a moment of crowd work that included their entire audience. Kaye ended Hard To Swallow, his first new show in two years, conducting a sold-out crowd at The Capitol in a cathartic chant: “You fucking got this, bitch!” Meanwhile, Eftos pulled us from our seats at the Art Centre’s Playhouse to dance on stage with her to an 80s beat. These endings represented an attempt by these comedians to land a cathartic resolution to their shows, both of which were explicitly interested in tackling contemporary frustrations.
Kaye’s Hard to Swallow channelled his skill for theatrical spectacle to dramatise the anger that makes us unable to connect with each other. Kaye has made angrier shows in the past. But Hard to Swallow was notable for being interested in connecting his personal anger to a culture-wide rage at a divisive world where injustice doesn’t make the people who can resolve injustice angry enough. Case-in-point: two men in front of me walk out two-minutes into his opening number when he points out the irony of looksmaxxing coming from manosphere-obsessed men who are likely to oppose gender-affirming care for trans people.
Meanwhile Elouise Eftos’s Aphrodite is about romantic love, modern dating, and the resurgence of an explicitly feminist anger at exactly the kinds of men that Kaye maligns. Ten minutes in and Eftos uses her anger to seal an audience member in his seat like it’s a coffin after he responds to her question about what we should do with toxic men with a ‘not all men’ argument.
But it is telling that Eftos’s flash-mob ending and Kaye’s choral chant are the least effective parts of their shows. In part 1 of this Substack (who am I, the two-part conclusion to a 2010s teen dystopic franchise??) I emphasised Kate Dehnert’s talent for challenging laughter’s capacity to resolve anger’s negativity by making it positive. The problem with these endings is that they put too much stock in resolving anger. Kaye’s chant becomes saccharine because it overplays that kind of catharsis. Eftos’s communal dance break almost lands by making the dancefloor a neutral space where anger, tragedy and laughter can co-exist. But her lack of focus throughout the show, skews this more interesting (and Dehnert-esq) neutrality into a cliché overt positivism. The main problem is that these endings are outliers in shows that offered up more interesting versions of catharsis that combined anger and laughter to tarry with this moment in contemporary politics.
Any one read Labour’s budget? Frustrated exasperation reigns.
rage-baiting men
The UK-based magazine New Statesman pissed me off the other day when it published Angry Young Women: a cluster of op-eds about the surge of anger among leftist AFAB people. The premise was good: an attempt to challenge the miasmic media focus on the ‘manosphere’ by showcasing the femme-led political movements emerging in rage-filled reaction to it. Unfortunately, every article painted this so-called ‘femosphere’ with a dour seriousness bordering on piety. Maybe some of the people they interviewed are just boring (a god-given right for every eighteen-year-old). But it feels disingenuous to read an author attend a university poetry reading and be surprised that it skews toward self-seriousness. Or, to believe that every single person in that audience hearing someone read about “wondering what it would be like to be fucked by a bull’, before pausing and saying, ‘“I’ve never had that thought. Maybe it’s because I’m gay” are taking it seriously.
Anger does not belie humour. The Left has a reputation for being humourless but our anger has replaced post-Trump (part 2) pessimism to make us more down for a laugh than ever. My experience of Leftist spaces and groups is that they’re just as boring as anyone, but much funnier when you’re not a journalist from New Statesman clearly studying them from the outside looking in. No one knows how easily laughter and anger can co-exist than those who have reason to be angry and first-hand experience of systems that deny their laughter by often taking it so seriously.
Those who have their anger politicised expand the mechanisms and forms by which they express that anger. Laughter is the key to this, not as an antithesis of anger, but as its most community-building complement. We had the surge of queer joy poptimism from Heartstopper onward. Now we want the spiteful campiness of Divine commanding us to ‘Kill all heterosexuals!’ in Pink Flamingos. Or comedian Elouise Eftos dancing and winking at us after calling male comedians predators less than five minutes into her show.
Aphrodite is Eftos’s follow up to the runaway success of the Australia’s First Attractive Comedian. It was too long and too unfocused when I saw it at the Arts Centre (something Eftos is the first to admit). But it did underline Eftos’s skill set as a performer: her capacity to use her own anger and the anger of her audience to construct a power dynamic that plays with the unique sense of intimacy of shared anger. Aphrodite uses Eftos’s suspicion of romantic love to explore modern frustrations about the trending misogyny in modern men. How she draws on our anger as an audience (both from those with her and against her) underlined what New Statesman’s dry depiction of rage-filled women evidently missed: how funny it can be to be angry with your mates.
The clearest example of this was a moment when Eftos roasted the man in front of me after he mistakenly tried to diffuse her critique of manipulative men by arguing for a ‘not all men’-style empathy. While you’re wondering whether she’s genuinely angry at this guy or hamming up her anger, she’s got you in the palm of her hand. This has always been Eftos’ approach: she revels in the tension she creates alienating people through her unapologetic anger. She struts across the stage, throwing her hair back as she gleefully lets the conflict linger unresolved. Instead of resolution, she goads us, expanding the tension with a step-ball-change or a flirtatious pose. Each gesture taunts us with the power she has over to control that tension, and theatricalises her refusal to make us comfortable again.
By toying with the power anger affords her via various modes of flirtation, Eftos inverts another presumption that served as the thesis statement for her first show: that explicitly feminine gestures represent submissiveness rather than power. Her model for this show is Greek Mythology, populated by examples of the feminine that do not presume vulnerability but perform it to start wars, control lives, and serve cunt. Her poise makes more out our anticipation and more political power to her control of the room. Of course, there are moments when these gestures become a crutch to pad a failed joke, mask Eftos’s insecurity in her performance, or a disingenuous attempt to shoehorn a bombing bit into this wider commentary. But seeing Eftos, in a Studio 54 fit, throwing her hands up sexily right after laughing at a man? It’s another string to the bow of comedic anger: a distinctly theatrical way of gleefully reveling in rage.
Laughter and anger share an ability to give a feeling we find incomprehensible a clear object. But they also have a complementary, though inverse, relationship to power. Making Donald Trump a punchline, for instance, gives us the ability to disempower him in a world where that seems impossible. Getting mad at him empowers us to laugh at him more. Put it this way: anger empowers the angry; laughter disempowers the laughed at. No wonder Trump had a magician at the White House Correspondents Dinner instead of the usual standup comedian. “Silly,” Eftos quips, returning to the man in front of me to laugh at his crossed arms and dogged refusal to laugh. The phrase is a signature shorthand Eftos often deploys when an audience isn’t quite on her side with a bit yet. But here, it pulls us in right next to her, happy in the shared sense of power that comes from translating anger into laughing at a man who would rather perform his bruised ego than think about why he’s become a punchline.
Put it this way: anger empowers the angry; laughter disempowers the laughed at.
rage is a hard pill to swallow
Hard to Swallow is a raucous blend of Reuben Kaye classics: double entendres, soaring showstopping numbers, horny audience involvement, and explicitly political transgressiveness. He’s an angrier presence on stage than in previous shows, but he’s also more optimistic than ever, pivoting from impassioned rants to deeply felt personal anecdotes; asides about queer history to anthems that locate our shared frustrations in the fact that we don’t seem to be able to connect over anything anymore. Where most are side stepping political landmines for the sake of social cohesion, Kaye plants a glittering stilettoed heel on our most sensitive national problems and presses in deep enough to draw blood.
Kaye is no stranger to navigating the thorny edges of contemporary politics. Where his previous shows were structured around a confessional narrative, Hard to Swallow casts its net wider. The effect is a bit meandering. But you can see the logic: Kaye is throwing everything in—the baby, the bath water; transphobia, Israel’s genocidal ‘war’, male loneliness, One Nation—to reflect the exasperated multi-focus of our similarly helter skelter frustrations. Kaye doesn’t think that the answer to our anger is to compromise, or meet in the middle (‘Meet me in the middle says the unjust man’, he tells us). Rather, it’s to realise that anger is not a personal problem to be solved, but a symptom of wider issues. Looking dead on at our anger can help us clarify those problems and connect through them. At a time when honey-coloured escapism has become legislated as a national value, Kaye offers something rougher and more cathartic: a space for paradoxes to coexist without the need to smooth out their thorns.
‘…the empathy that comes from being angry on behalf of someone.’
A key part of the show is Kaye’s opposition to the belief that we need to avoid conflict or discomfort. This avoidance, Kaye argues, compromises opportunities for connection. More specifically, it eliminates the empathy that comes from being angry on behalf of someone. Kaye offers a case-in-point by being angriest when gesturing to problems facing transpeople, Palestinians, women. It’s a cabaret-style anger, of course: a devilish grin, a sudden rise in volume, a belted G above a seven-piece band. You notice it more by contrast. When Kaye delivers anecdotes about his personal experience as a Jewish, queer, cis man, for instance, it is with a differing mode of softness and minimalism. As the show continues, and this pattern of contrasting delivery styles repeat, Kaye effectively scaffolds a form of anger to answer our sense of it being without object, and our exhaustion at feeling it dispersed across numerous objects: feel anger for someone. Call it rage bait via radical empathy; this idea that anger and laughter share a capacity to connect.
When Kaye leads his audience in that final chant of “You have mother fucking got this bitch!”, it hackneyed but it also comes after many more successful attempts from Kaye throughout the show that make the spectacle of cabaret itself a way into expressing anger cathartically by theatricalising and dramatizing it. This specifies the catharsis Kaye offers: not one predicated on resolving anger, but on giving it a better and funnier means of expression. The catharsis we gain in Hard to Swallow (and Aphrodite, and Echo) is not at having our anger resolved (something that could easily be co-opted into an apolitical, escapist fantasy) but in feeling our object-less anger and frustration localised, defined and then shared.
I joined Kaye and the people sitting around me in this chant as it built to a scream, feeling the real frustrations beneath it bubble up and join in on the spectacle.