Emma Holland brings ‘Here Comes Mr Forehead’ to HOTA
A week or so before she takes the stage at HOTA, we catch up with Emma Holland –stand-up comedian and writer on ‘The Cheap Seats’ and ‘Have You Been Paying Attention?’ – to talk creativity, comedy and… Mr Forehead?
Scrolling through Emma Holland’s TikTok brings up many questions. Mostly, “Who thinks of this stuff? And how?”. Obviously, those were the first questions we asked her.
“A lot of the time it’s when I’m walking my dog,” Emma says. “It’s a very monotonous task, so I drift off and start making lists in my Notes app. I love the Notes app – I’ve got a whole year’s worth of strange thoughts in there. Sometimes when I go back and look at them, I even confuse myself. It’s great.”
It seems confusion and comedy go hand in hand for Emma. Whether she’s performing live on stage or filling in on ‘The Cheap Seats’, you’ll often see audience members or co-hosts smiling in awkward bafflement when she delivers a line, totally straight-faced. It’s almost always backed up with eye-watering punchline – her classic one-two punch.
Unlike her previous tour (thematic, narrative-driven), Emma wanted to create something light-hearted this time around. That’s how ‘Here Comes Mr Forehead’ was born.
“The name comes from a phrase my husband and I use around the house when I have an idea that I think is funny, but it turns out I’m just tired,” Emma says. “Writing for TV, a lot of the show scripts come in quite late, which means I have to stay up writing. By that point, I can never tell what’s actually funny.”
‘Here comes Mr Forehead’ was the punchline to one such joke. After writing it, Emma says she woke up in a cold sweat and rushed to delete it. Ever since, her husband has used it to mock her.
“Now that I’ve based a whole tour around it, I guess the joke’s on him,” she says.
It’s a fitting name for a tour that sets out to simply have fun. Emma’s hope is that audiences walk out with a lot of joy.
“Once I decided that goal, it was easy – anything that made me laugh just went in,” she says. “Every comic has a completely different process. For me, it’s a bit of a mix. Some things just come to me, other times I put on the noise-cancelling headphones and churn stuff out. That doesn’t produce the funniest material, but it often gives me the structures that I can then put other jokes into.”
Trial shows are another big part of the process – both to road test her material and to keep herself accountable. “I need to give myself a lot of mini deadlines,” she says.
But whether she’s writing for her own sets or writing for Melanie Bracewell and Tim McDonald on ‘The Cheap seats’, Emma’s general approach is to start wide and narrow in.
“When you write for someone else, you don’t really know what they’ll be drawn to, so I just put everything in,” she says. “I edit more heavily when I’m writing for myself, though this show was easier – I had a pretty open mind. Anything and everything was allowed.”
That’s a big part of what Emma loves about the Australian comedy scene – the variety. Growing up in Indonesia, with DVDs (picked up during her parents’ travel) as her only exposure to Aussie comedy, Emma had a totally different perspective when she was a kid.
“I grew up watching ‘Thank God You’re Here’, ‘Good News Week’ and ‘Kath & Kim’, so I thought it was all panel shows and sitcoms. When I moved here for uni and started listening to Australian stand up, I realised how diverse it is.
“It’s also cool to work with the people I grew up watching. That’s crazy.” (Check out Emma taking the ‘Thank God You’re Here’ stage right here).
History does have a funny way of repeating itself – the comedy chops Emma no doubt picked up as a kid watching ‘Good News Week’ are serving her well on the shows she writes for. They give her a chance to write about what’s going on in the world – a stark contrast to her own sets, which are decidedly un-topical (as Emma tells us, “I mostly talk about pop culture from 2006 to 2010.”)
“You want to check the temperature of the stories,” she says. “Those harder topics are important to talk about and comment on, but there’s a time and a place. Anyone who says, ‘You can’t say anything anymore!’ is totally wrong – you actually can, there are audiences waiting for it and people who are making a lot of money doing it.”
That’s part of why she loves performing live and writing for TV at the same time – every joke finds its place. There’s also a nice balance to having so many things on the go. She wouldn’t like any of them as much if she couldn’t do them all.
“If I had to rank them -” [let’s be clear, we didn’t make her] “- I would say performing live is my favourite, writing for TV is my second favourite and performing on TV is my third favourite.”
It’s a balance beam, but one she navigates expertly. Emma’s ability to confuse, catch off guard and, ultimately, delight an audience hits any space she occupies – TV news desk or fringe festival stage – with a breath of fresh air.
“I think my point of view is very strange and interesting, and I like to make people look at things in a strange and interesting way,” she says. “I hope people come away from this show thinking, ‘I’ve never seen or heard that before’.”
From the very first moment of ‘Here Comes Mr Forehead’ – as she rolls out on a Lime scooter, then asks if anybody in the audience likes Facebook Marketplace – we think she does that.
