Ben Searle has been part of Melbourne comedy’s engine room since the mid-2010s, juggling his life on stage with the behind-the-scenes work that keeps rooms alive.
This year, he’s getting ready for a new Melbourne International Comedy Festival show, Shelter in the Age of Loneliness, built around a surprising stat: he’s lived in 28 houses.
We spoke to him about how the scene has changed, what it takes to turn messy material into a real show, why ‘good enough’ can beat perfect, and some comedians worth your time.
You toured Punk Music in 2025. Is that still in the mix, or are you already working on something new?
I’ve been working on a new show for a while, which is called Shelter in the Age of Loneliness. It’s meant to sound like a death-metal album or something.
It’s about every house that I’ve lived in. I counted up a little while ago and realised that I’ve lived in 28 houses, which I started to go, ‘How did that happen? Why did that occur?’, and that’s kind of the basis for my next show.
Shelter in the Age of Loneliness. It’s meant to sound like a death metal album or something
This year I’m looking at taking Punk Music to Edinburgh and saving the new show for Melbourne.
What clicked for you once your show Punk Music was in front of crowds night after night?
When it came to doing Punk Music...after the first two shows I woke up and it was like, ‘Oh the show’s meant to be like this,’ and spent from the time I woke up until showtime restructuring the show...and then the show started working and I started really having fun with it.
It was a real learning experience in how to make a show, and I feel really proud of that show now and also think there is more I can do with it.
That’s the beauty of stand-up: the more you perform the shows, the better they get and you find new things and you’re like, ‘Oh shit this was meant to be in the show the whole time,’ and there’s a joke here that I missed and I could put that into it.
Until you film a show…you’re tweaking the show and perfecting it.
That tension between perfection and publishing comes up for a lot of creatives. How do you navigate it?
I had a conversation with a friend of mine, Stacy. I asked, ‘Stacy, how do I get better at proofreading?’ and she was like, ‘You could just decide you’re the kind of person that needs to put work out there or you are you the kind of person that needs to put out perfect work.’ Her putting it like that makes it much easier. You just pick.
Obviously I’m trying to proofread things before I put them out, but you could pour over everything forever. It’s never going to be perfect.
I found that I put this newsletter out that I was kind of a bit unsure about and maybe a bit more vulnerable than I’ve been in the past and it’s like, ‘Oh weird,’ I got this great reaction from this thing that was a bit more earnest and a bit more honest, and I didn’t just hold it back.
I think stand-up in general is a process of getting closer to being who you are on stage. There is a persona to a certain aspect, but I think people respond to honesty and vulnerability and things like that, as well as being fun.
You’ve got that funny bit about arguing with your girlfriend while you were living in a studio. When you get vulnerable like that, it becomes really relatable, especially with housing being what it is.
The reason I put that up [on Instagram] is because the themes of the newest show are kind of similar and it’s more about the share house side of things and living with other people but it’s something that’s been really on my mind a lot lately.
I think when you’re putting a show together you’re like, ‘Fuck is this relatable? Do people care about this stuff?’ And I think the job is to make them care, to make people go like, ‘Oh, this is my life.’
Fuck is this relatable, do people care about this stuff?
While it might not be exactly the same as you, I think we all have these common touchstones in experience and I think particularly stuff around housing at the moment, it’s like everyone’s kind of feeling the pinch, so there are those things that are mostly universal.
That reminds me of something you’ve said about one of your favourites, Ali Siddiq, and his ability to bridge audiences.
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about what I like about really good comedians, and about the comedians I really resonate with. Someone like Ali Siddiq, Paul F Tompkins and Mike Birbiglia and Australian comedians like Anne Edmonds. They bring you to them.
There are broad comedians that are doing very basic men and women stuff, basically, where they’re kind of rounding off the edges so that they can go to the audience.
But what I love about the comedians that I really love, maybe talking about something that is not that relatable and kind of winning you over and bringing you in, I think there’s a real art to that.
Someone like Ali Siddiq is like talking about his father who was like this really eccentric character, but there’s these touchstones in there where it reminds me of your parents, reminds you of some kind of figure like that in your life.
You’re not going to get everyone, but I think that’s the challenge and that’s kind of the beauty of it.
You ran Catfish Comedy for a couple of years, what was that like?
Yeah. I handed it over mid-year to a new crew after running it for about two and a half years. It’s sort of a Melbourne institution now.
I was the third person to run it and I ran it with a friend of mine, Zac, for a while. I’m performing there tonight, so it’s nice to go back there and perform there when I felt like I steadied the ship for a while.
I’ve kind of always been in that side of things as well, running the gigs as well as performing, just because I kind of feel like you want to give back a little bit, and actually putting on shows where yourself and other comedians can perform is part of it, at least for me anyway.
I’m working on a new weekly show with a venue at the moment. I don’t think I realised quite how tough it is. Simply the act of getting people through the door is like, you can work on the art side as much as possible, you still need to get people through the door.
What’s the hardest part of getting people out to shows?
There’s a lot of great comedy in Melbourne and there’s a lot of great audiences out seeing that comedy.
I think it’s sort of just a fact of Australia, maybe just because of population size. A lot of people watch comedy and watch it online, but I think Australian comedy is still growing and you have these dips and waves in it as well.
I think there was a real boom after COVID where there seemed to be a real appetite for it, and that goes in waves, and I guess online stuff changes that a bit, so it’s interesting to observe.
How has the Melbourne scene changed since you started?
I started around 2015, and the scene was a lot smaller. When I came into it, it was when there started to be a real open-mic culture where you could gig a lot and you could bounce around, but you still knew everyone and you still mostly knew everyone in the scene.
Now it’s grown to a point where on a Saturday night in the city in Melbourne there are four places that you can go and see comedy that are ‘clubby’, which is Comedy Republic, Comics Lounge in North Melbourne, Basement Comedy and there’s Coopers Inn.
Most of them on a Saturday night will be pretty full and some of them sell out, so there’s definitely an audience there for it.
There’s a lot more gigs at the moment. There’s lots of open mics and there’s lots of clubs.
There’s not really much of a middle of the scene, and that’s something that comes in waves a bit.
Most comedy shows are run by comedians, but there used to be people that would just run shows. Those people, I don’t really see too many of those types of people around anymore. Or maybe they just go into more formal jobs.
Would you say it feels easier to get stage time now, or harder?
It seems like the scene in Melbourne is more mature and more professional than when I started, which is a positive, and people take it more seriously. But I guess that means there’s a lot more comedians and a lot more people fighting for stage time.
It’s weirdly better than ever, but then parts of it feel kind of weird. So you’re kind of in that ebb and flow.
The scene is healthy but the bottom of the scene could be a bit healthier. You still have to do the open mics and the lower-level gigs to build up material and I think those are the ones that are suffering a bit more.
I’ve been talking about it with a lot of comedians that have been at it for a while and saying, what could we do to give back to younger comedians that are in it, and could we be doing more to advise them about gigs and say, ‘Oh hey, you got to have a spotlight like this, and you got to have the room dark, and you got to make sure the room’s got some air conditioning’.
Who should people be paying attention to in Australian comedy right now?
I’ll shout out three Melbourne comics who all have shows, and are all smashing it: Bronwyn Kuss, Jordan Barr, Andrew Portelli.
