An hour until showtime, organiser Riley Jones admitted he was nervous.
“It’s a gamble. Comedy’s always a gamble,” Jones told The Tertangala at the showcase last night of the Wollongong Comedy Festival.
“People will be like ‘I’m funny’ and then they do it, and then they’re not, and then you fill the room full of people, and you’ve told everybody in the room that this person is funny, and then they might not be.
“Your first thought is like ‘everything will go wrong.’”
Jones, a comedian himself, said the festival is the first Wollongong can call it’s own.
“(I thought) ‘what if I just didn’t have to catch the train to Sydney (to see a comedy festival), and that was the main crux of Wollongong Comedy Festival,” Jones said.
“I thought about it for probably like three or four years and I was like ‘they should really do something like it and then this year I was like ‘you know what? No one’s going to do it, I’m going to do it.”
Running until throughout the week, Wollongong is being treated to local and outside talent at the Side Door Theatre space in the CBD. Liam McCann hit the stage last night.
“We’ve hit it off with a bang. I don’t think it could have gone better,” McCann told The Tertangala after the show.
He said the festival will help grow the local comedy scene.
“That’s how it starts. People see comedy, they want to do it, they want to see it more, they start participating,” McCann said.
“The more people we have to come to shows, the more shows we can do as local comics. And if Sydney comics see an audience down here they’ll come down here, they’ll meet us- ‘cause this whole game is networking.
“They’ve (the organisers) put so much work into this and they’ve got really good names.”
As long as admin work doesn’t bog him down, Jones said there’ll be more festivals for years to come.
People interested can get tickets at Eventbrite.
Feature image: River McCrossen