Cats, confidence and comedy: The mortifying ordeal of being Rose Bishop

Albany-raised, Melbourne-based comedian Rose Bishop is returning to Western Australia for Fringe World this year, bringing her new show Clap If You’re Mad At Me to The Laugh Resort at The Shoe Bar & Cafe from Wednesday, January 22 to Sunday, January 25—with tickets on sale now. NATASHA PAUL caught up with Rose Bishop to find out about a comedy journey shaped by cats, confidence, and the mortifying ordeal of being seen.

Congratulations on bringing your show, Clap If You’re Mad At Me, to Perth Fringe World for the first time! As someone originally from Albany and now based in Melbourne, what is it like to be performing in Perth?

It feels so good to be finally bringing a solo show to Fringe World. I’m such a big WA defender—I find people in Melbourne can be a bit snobby about Perth before they go there, but once they experience doing a season of a show at Fringe World, they generally change their tune. It’s a really fun, positive, and warm festival, warm both figuratively and literally.

Your comedy shows A Matter of Time and Feral are hilariously relatable in their focus on modern dating, mental illness, and cats. How does Clap If You’re Mad At Me feel different from these shows?

My first two shows had a lot of weird stories from my life in them, but for this new show I’m trying to go wider and talk about the stuff I think most of us share—having a human body and feeling weird about it, overthinking everything, and saying ‘haha’ too much at the end of text messages so no one thinks you’re being too direct and gets mad at you—I hope that last one isn’t just me…

When I’m doing these new jokes around Melbourne, I often get people coming up to me afterwards and saying how much they relate, so I hope it’ll be a really cathartic show for me and for the audience!

And where do you get your ideas for new material? Is it mostly drawn from your own experiences?

Definitely. Every time I see something that makes me laugh or notice something weird or overhear something funny, I jot it down in my notes app on my phone, and almost all my jokes get built out from there. A lot of comedy is just being observant!

But I also get a lot of my jokes just from complaints that I have about my two cats and their rude, disrespectful, and weird behaviour. I’m still getting used to cats and their habits. I find them so funny, and I wish they would stop throwing up in my shoes.

The show includes tidbits about stage fright and your lifelong fear of public speaking. So, what inspired you to pursue a stand-up career, which is essentially a career of public speaking?

I first tried stand-up just as a challenge to myself, to prove to myself that if I did do really high-stakes public speaking, nothing bad would happen. I didn’t intend to ever do it again. I was just trying to face my fears so I’d be less nervous doing more regular forms of public speaking, like giving presentations at work.

I was almost annoyed when my set went pretty well because I realised right away that I was probably going to want to do it more, and I was cursing myself to feel nervous every time I did a gig. And I was right!!

I still get nervous before every gig, but I’ve realised that that’s really common for comedians, and it’s just about making the fear take a backseat and not getting in the way of you doing stuff that you love. And I do love stand-up. I love the weirdos I meet, the creative outlet, and just the rush of making strangers laugh.

Since your stand-up debut in 2017, you’ve received recognition for your comedy, becoming a Raw Comedy National Finalist in 2019 and receiving a Melbourne International Comedy Festival Stand Up! Grant last year. How do you feel knowing you have this support for your work?

Those moments were so encouraging. A lot of stand-up comedy is really solitary and weird, whether it’s travelling to gigs at night, writing your jokes by yourself, or trying to distract yourself after a bad set, so having those moments where you remember that other people are watching your career and want to help you along really makes you feel connected to the comedy community and want to keep going even when it’s hard.

You are a founding member of Breast of the Fest, a comedy showcase of female-identifying performers. Why do you think this representation in the comedy world is so important?

So many comedians I meet who are from under-represented backgrounds had really unusual paths into comedy because they just didn’t see people like them on stage, so it took them ages to realise that doing comedy was even an option for them. And weirdly that includes women, even though we account for half the population.

We’re still underrepresented on line-ups around the country. But I’ve noticed a shift even just in the eight years I’ve been gigging in Melbourne. There are heaps more nights now that are dedicated to showcasing performers from under-represented groups, and the scene in general is just less blokey and intimidating.

And I just think that’s so important because performing comedy is already hard and vulnerable a lot of the time, so it’s good to have other performers around who might understand you a bit better because they have similar backgrounds, but I think it’s also better for the audiences—anyone who’s ever sat through a gig where five blokes in a row talk about their dicks knows that having more diverse line-ups makes for more interesting shows!!

What’s next for the rest of the year? Can we expect to see you back in Perth soon?

Definitely! I’m hoping to come back and do some more shows in the middle of the year, partly because there are some really awesome regular gigs in Perth now, but mainly because Melbourne winter sucks and I will absolutely never stop complaining about it!!

Rose Bishop’s Clap If You’re Mad At Me is showing at The Laugh Resort at The Shoe Bar & Cafe from Wednesday, January 22 to Sunday, January 25, 2025. Tickets are on sale now from fringeworld.com.au