AUSTRALIAN born comedian Felicity Ward discusses chicken karaoke, fennel and losing her bag with Quays News entertainment reporter Rae Coppola, as she prepares to embark on her first ever UK tour, ‘50% more likely to die.’
Following a critically acclaimed, sell-out stint at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Ward has been growing in popularity among British audiences.
The world works in mysterious ways, and in a strange twist of fate, the comic left her bag on a bus.
She said: “I had all these grand plans about writing a show about mental health, but I lost my laptop, my wallet, my keys and these really cool underwater headphones.
“I couldn’t have written it, so the show turned out to be about a lady with control issues who loses her bag.
“It’s terrifying to be doing a show on my own, absolutely terrifying. But it’s also really exciting.”
Had a great time at @felicityward 50% More Likely to Die at the @BikeShedTheatre last night. Lots more dates to catch her all over the UK! pic.twitter.com/U4HtnpWD0x
— Bethan HighgateBetts (@beth_yeah) October 3, 2016
Her past content revolves around depression, anxiety and IBS; a real crowd pleaser, seriously.
Writing about mental health is difficult because, “It’s deeply personal, and people might have found it challenging to relax.
“In the context of Edinburgh Fringe Festival that’s what people come to expect, but when you’re out on the road, people might not be as ready to go as abstract.”
However, those that connected with her material, really connected.
She has had an extremely powerful response: “I had people write to me from the doctor’s surgery saying I’ve been ignoring this for months but I saw your show and now I’m doing something about it.
“That is amazing and wonderful, but I do not expect that or try and achieve that. It’s just a lovely by-product that happened to have happened.”
The new show is meant to be straightforward, stand up storytelling, with no gimmicks or hard to grasp content. The comedy will be dark, to match the cynical humour of its creator and it will be different, but Felicity believes it will be interesting to see how the rest of the country respond to the show.
You have to catch @felicityward on her tour this autumn. Simply wonderful. #bwark
— David Chapple (@TheWhysguy) October 2, 2016
The comic is always on the lookout for inspiration, and desperately trying to find it in everything and anything she can.
When she appeared on Russell Howard’s Good News in 2012, she even dedicated a section of her show to punny commercial business names with, ‘Pieminister,’ being the runner up and, ‘Halal, is it meat you’re looking for,’ taking the hotspot. The comedian apparently still gets pun contenders sent to her and writes them down.
She said, “I’ve got into this habit where anytime a word even sounds funny and I don’t know why it sounds funny, or why it is funny, I just write it down.
“I was just thinking, ‘fennel’ is a funny word, so I write down the word fennel, and one day I might have a bit about fennel.”
Having recently made her very own highly successful documentary, ‘Felicity’s Mental Mission,’ and beginning a chicken karaoke segment on her Instagram account, we’ve been seeing lots more of the comedian on our screens as well as our stages, and there are no signs of her appearances coming to a halt.
She joked, “It’ll be like death by a thousand cuts, this country, with my comedy.”
By Rae Coppola
@raethedeer
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