According to Broden Kelly, comedy is like an orchid; it needs the perfect conditions to grow. That’s why, five years ago, his comedy trio Aunty Donna established Grouse House: a YouTube platform launched to support up-and-coming comedians, who can leverage off Aunty Donna’s existing fanbase rather than getting stuck in the weeds of promotion and distribution.
Grouse House has been ticking along ever since, hosting absurdist, experimental comedy that shares the Aunty Donna DNA, such as Gocsy’s Classics – a nostalgic TV parody series from Aaron Gocs, sending up retro TV faves like Round the Twist and Heartbreak High; quizshow The Most Upsetting Guessing Game in the World, featuring names like Daniel Sloss and Nick Cody; and comedy sci-fi series Descent from Millie Holten, Madi Savage and Ella Lawry.
But it’s crunch time. If Aunty Donna and their production house, Haven’t You Done Well, want to seriously provide a leg-up for comedians, they have to independently invest in their development rather than relying on grants, which means stumping up production costs and a modest salary for everyone working on their next wave of shows. That’s why much of the proceeds of Aunty Donna’s Drem World Tour, which has just kicked off in Hobart, will go toward Grouse House; and it’s why they’ve also added a commercial arm to Haven’t You Done Well, creating sketches, podcasts and creator partnerships for brands.
The three members of Aunty Donna – Kelly, Mark Bonanno and Zachary Ruane – are talking to Guardian Australia at their HQ in Brunswick, Melbourne, in a meeting room filled with lollies and coloured Post-It notes. Since forming in 2011, their success has spanned tours, TV shows and viral videos. Netflix US commissioned a series, the Big Ol’ House of Fun, in 2020, as did the ABC in 2023 (Aunty Donna’s Coffee Cafe), but their focus now is on forging a new model.
“We could feel the writing was on the wall with network comedy in Australia,” says Kelly. “There are two that do it – 10 and ABC2 – but it’s Lord-of-the-Rings-style odyssey shit to get commissioned. Our experience is that when we were given the green light to either go make a pilot or a proof of concept, it needed to be everything to everyone, and we’d receive heavy rounds of notes.”
Aunty Donna’s relationship with the ABC started with the network’s Fresh Blood initiative in 2014, when they were selected to create sketches for ABC iview. One sketch, Bikie Wars, garnered 1.5m views on YouTube and a pilot was commissioned, but not a series (it is now on 4m). That’s one of the main problems in their view: networks will often take a punt at the beginning, but there’s little long-term nurturing or risk-taking.
“In the UK, the BBC has always had a culture of experimentation,” says Bonanno. “The Mighty Boosh got three seasons; they got to play. The ABC just doesn’t have that culture. It did in the 90s and even the early 00s, then it became super-safe. In my dream scenario, the ABC is a playground – and it should be, because they’re not having to satisfy advertisers.”
We meet a week after the Logie awards, at which the ABC had a strong night – but Aunty Donna have something to say about awards, too. “With the Oscars, if you win best director or best picture, you can have a career because there’s an industry there to support it,” says Bonanno. “What frustrates me about the Logies, the AWGIEs and AACTAs is we give these awards out, but then what? There’s no room to grow. I won an AWGIE for sitcom writing, and it did less for my career than before I had one.”
In 2023, the ABC screened the six-part series Aunty Donna’s Coffee Cafe, but the overall viewing numbers were eclipsed by one real estate sketch, shot over a few hours for $500, which Aunty Donna uploaded to YouTube.
“You’ve got to forget what 14-year-old you would want for your career, because all we wanted was an ABC2 show,” says Kelly. “By the time we got one, we put it out on a platform that was inept and did a bad job of promoting it.” (The ABC did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.)
And so, Aunty Donna aspire to be “platform agnostic”, or as Bonanno puts it: “Never build your house in someone else’s back yard.” If they had put all their eggs into the YouTube basket, they might have suffered when advertising revenue dropped for many creators. If they had focused only on touring, Covid could have been their death knell. “Defining yourself by your means of distribution is a strange thing to do,” says Ruane.
And even YouTube doesn’t seem as sturdy as it once was. No one’s clear on whether the Australian government’s ban on YouTube accounts for under-16s, which kicks in on 10 December, will be effective or enforceable. Will young Australian subscribers suddenly disappear from Grouse House’s tally? They’re not too worried. Enough of their audience is over 18, or comes from overseas – and they’re about to launch their own platform anyway.
In the next few months, Grouse House will trial a subscription service (hard launching in early 2026), similar to the independent streaming platform Dropout TV, which arose out of CollegeHumor. Most of the content will still be available for free on YouTube, but they’re confident that a percentage of fans will be happy to pay, say, $6 a month for exclusives and a community.
The top-line goal is to make Australia’s comedy identity as pronounced as it was when they themselves were growing up, glued to Full Frontal, Kath and Kim, Lano and Woodley, and Big Girl’s Blouse.
after newsletter promotion
“Anytime we tour overseas, people talk about Australian comedy like it’s a genre,” says Kelly. “Australia has a really interesting, distinct voice. Our biggest exports outside comedy are things like Baz Luhrmann and Mad Max, King Gizzard, Amyl and the Sniffers – weird, tasteless [or] crazy. The rest of the world knows that about us, but we need to learn that ourselves.”
In March this year, Lee Naimo joined Grouse House as head of creative, from Screen Australia, where he had been instrumental in funding Grouse House’s first series, Hug the Sun.
“We want to build out shows that we could take on live tours or move into video games,” Naimo says. “We’re trying to get that brand recognition. Like when you see something that’s from Adult Swim, you know exactly what you’re going to get.”
Grouse House does pay the talent it nurtures (“not enough to quit your day job,” Naimo warns), but the current focus is on small-budget “shiny-floor” productions: gameshows, improv and interview shows, rather than long-form scripted shows with big crews.
One such shiny-floor show is the newly launched SO YOU WANNA WIN A P*NIS PUMP? (SYWWAPP), described as “What happens if you leave Taskmaster and Game Changer too close to the heater and they melt”. The first four-episode season was recorded over two days, with guests including US comedy stalwart Paul F Tompkins, as well as locals Tom Cardy and Becky Lucas.
Grouse House provided financial and moral support, Lardner tells Guardian Australia, allowing her to take the show from her Twitch channel to a much larger audience. She’s frustrated that TV networks tend to stick to the same faces: “We’re also working very hard. We’ve been provably successful, and we have a following.”
And in September, Grouse House will host six pilot episodes from Greg Larsen – a project that can itself be read as commentary on the weight that pilots carry in Australia. They range from an interview show where he and guest comedian Michelle Brasier play video games and talk about trauma, to a show called Mark Bonanno Shows His Anus. Grouse House is putting “time, effort and money” into getting projects up, Larsen says. “They trust me completely, and I trust them. They’re a lot more willing to take risks.”
Aunty Donna’s agility will probably keep them safe amid shifting landscapes. Kelly attributes their nimbleness to the fact that they never became household names. “Our secret recipe is that we were never actually that big,” he says. “We were big enough to sustain, but we never blew up. I was talking to someone who was very famous in comedy in their mid-20s, and he said every week he worries about being irrelevant. And we’ve genuinely never felt that. We’ve seen enough ebbs and flows to know that it comes and goes.”