Rose Callaghan: I’m not a girlboss, not yet a womanboss

Rose Callaghan’s show is about making a living – or, to be blunt, survival.  She’s small, perky, charming, energetic, but also a little cynical and a little grumpy.  Not so much complaining as exasperated.  Why is it all so hard?  Why isn’t she a girlboss? 

Diagnosed as having ADHD – and an ADHD Ambassador for the last four years - she nevertheless lists multiple skills – actor, presenter, media commentator, writer, hairdresser (only one client – a three-and-a-half-year-old boy) – and she does very well.  But as she tells us, she spends only 5% of her life standing in front of an audience doing comedy – which is what she really wants to do - and 95% doing things she may be good at (she is, in fact – as in always in work, awards and accolades) but not what she wants to do in just trying to get by. 

(Which must be frustrating for her because she won Best Comedy at Sydney Fringe in 2016 for her show Rose Before Hoes/Attention Deficit... Ooh, a Pony.)

She asks people in the audience what they do for ‘work’?  One guy claims to be a poet – and he gets the death stare, ‘Oh, really?’  She picks on some people in the front row and gets some other answers, but she doesn’t follow up – so, it’s as if to say, ‘It’s all right for some.’ 

One triumph for Callaghan was to go viral with a joke on the Internet – well, actually, on Linked-In.  Yes, she knows – Linked-In.  She asks us if anyone in the audience goes on Linked-In.  Only one person stuck their hand up – but they’re a lawyer...  Still, going viral got her some profile as a Linked-In Influencer – whatever that means. 

A big, central question for Callaghan is how do you monetise comedy in the age of the internet?  Perhaps the centrepiece of the show is her anecdote about negotiating a buyout price for her domain name Swipe Night.  She cannot find out who is the prospective buyer – who offers peanuts.  As if.  Callaghan asks us what we think – but what do we know?  Someone calls out a thousand?  Thinking it’s all a joke anyway, Callaghan negotiates; she goes higher – way higher...  

So, Callaghan does seem to be at home and know her way around the corporate world where she is occasionally employed as a host or a facilitator, and while she hasn’t made it to womanboss, some of the best moments of her show are her sceptical use of managerial jargon.  There she’s on firmer ground and it’s where she gets her best laughs.  Perhaps pushing further into that territory be her next show?  (Don Watson wrote a very funny book on that subject.)

Meanwhile, Callaghan’s not sure if she’s a millennial or Gen Z, but, anyway, now she figures she’s middle-aged.  What next?  But she tells us she’s happy, it’s all good... But in fact – undercutting herself again – she reveals that she’s divorced and a single mother of that boy whose hair she cuts...

The ADHD might explain the rushed, skittering, fractured nature of her narrative.  As it is, she sounds as if she’s in a mighty hurry to tell us as much as she can in fifty minutes – she keeps interrupting herself, doubling back, dropping sentences – but never losing her thread. If her show sounds terribly downbeat and ‘poor me’, somehow, it’s not.  It’s kind of cynical, yes, and the humour is black, but the show all hangs together as she pursues her theme.  It’s funny, the anecdotes are to the point, and her likeability and ‘never say die’ spirit gives us an up ending where we figure, ‘She’ll be okay.’

Michael Brindley