Outputs

Comedy Country is focussed on bringing its new perspective on Australian comedy to a wide and diverse section of the community. As well as traditional scholarly publications, we are producing significant public facing media outputs. These include short documentaries, podcasts, a travelling exhibition and walking tours based on 100 interviews with leading comedy practitioners and the rich archives and collections of our partners. Our multimedia content is to be curated and made available to the public through an interactive digital online Hub linking our partners and communities of interest.

With its partners the project will digitise archival content, conduct in-depth analyses of Australia’s two major comedy festivals, and develop public programs and performances in Melbourne and Adelaide.

This interdisciplinary collaboration between HASS scholars and the arts industry, utilising innovative digital methods for archive research and transmedia communication, lies at the heart of the project’s commitment to understanding and democratising the history of comedy and its national significance in Australia.

Apart from scholarly journal articles, Comedy Country communicates its discoveries through:

  • An online transmedia text and audio-visual hub that presents findings and original digitised archive material and data visualisations linked to partner and collaborator collections and members;
  • 100 video interviews and short documentaries that will be curated on the transmedia hub, but also via other channels, such as ABC iView, YouTube, Vimeo and other digital media;
  • 15 audio podcasts;
  • A digital exhibition that will present the findings to the public in Melbourne and Adelaide;
  • Augmented Reality applications for comedy walking tours of Melbourne and Adelaide;
  • A symposium in the fourth year to debate findings within the academic fields hosted by collaborator the Australasian Humour Studies Network;
  • A scholarly book authored by the chief investigators, which will explore the comprehensive history of Australian performance comedy’s role in socio-cultural change and national identities;
  • Further edited and illustrated collections inclusive of a wider network within the scholarly and practitioner fields. Publications will include titles focussed on particularly important collections, such as Arts Centre Melbourne’s Humphries collection and histories of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF) and Adelaide Fringe;
  • And finally, a state of the industry policy report.