“I usually ask if they’d like to show me the material or if they’d like to jump up and have a crack at it straight away,” says Webeck, who as a radio regular with a handful of TV appearances under her belt is on the brink of serious mainstream success. “Regardless of whether they know each other or not, they are always very comfortable to jump up, which I love. I think it’s amazing,” she says.

Like the festival’s other flagship development programs Raw and Deadly Funny, the idea is to find aspiring comedians, often in remote and regional areas, and create pathways for them into the world of professional comedy.

The origin of the program 25 years ago was a collaborative effort, says festival director Susan Provan.She credits fund-raising colleague Gary Morrison and former-teacher-turned-comedian Brian Nankervis for helping get it off the ground. “We started just in Melbourne and it’s now a national program with schools, teachers and kids involved from all over Australia,” she says.

A series of heats determines the line-up for the National Grand Final which is this Wednesday at Forum Melbourne, hosted by Geraldine Hickey. For anyone starting comedy as an adult, the time-honoured way is to slog it out in soul-destroying, poorly attended open mic nights in pubs, so to be able to play to a large, loving crowd at the iconic Forum as one of your earliest gigs is the stuff of dreams.

Likewise, the mentoring, which makes the Class Clowns experience something of a double-edged sword. The festival has created a genuinely nurturing environment for young people to explore and express their comedic sensibilities. “It is the nicest place to start comedy ever,” Fawcett rightly discerns.

However, there’s a crash landing coming once they hit the brutal reality of regular comedy nights. “There was definitely a lot of material about school, which didn’t do great in the months after at the bar open mics,” recalls Rhys Nicholson, who, like Tom Ballard, Josh Thomas, Annie Louey and Aaron Chen, are all alumni.

Nicholson, who was recently announced as a judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race Down Under, has his own Netflix special and is co-owner of Melbourne’s latest comedy in-crowd hotspot Comedy Republic, did his first gig as part of Class Clowns in 2006.

“It started my relationship with the Melbourne International Comedy Festival,” he says. “I can honestly say if it weren’t for Class Clowns I’d probably be 30 and still working at a Grill’d store in Newcastle.”

A “frustrated and anxious” teen who hated school, but obsessed over his VHS tapes of the annual Comedy Festival Gala he’d taped off the TV, Nicholson says Class Clowns gave him both the confidence and focus to pursue stand-up. “After Class Clowns, I tried to get some little gigs around Newcastle. I was not very good for a very long time,” he admits.

“Comedy is a skill you can master through practice, like anything else,” says rising stand-up star Annie Louey. “Bombing” or “dying” is all part of the process, which is why time on stage is crucial to artistic development but difficult to obtain when you’re under-age. Nicholson says, “My Dad used to drive me to a local Newcastle pub and wait out the front in the car while I ran in, did my shitty five minutes then ran back.”

This fact wasn’t lost on the festival. “We developed LOL Squad to help fill that gap but having supportive parents who will take you to gigs is definitely a plus,” says Provan.

Presented with the Arts Centre, LOL Squad started in 2016 and is “a week-long intensive working with some class clowns alumni to write, rehearse and then shoot with a professional camera team a bunch of online sketches,” says Dickins.

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Fawcett, who is now in year 12, has done LOL Squad. “That was really good and through doing that I did another program that they run, which is like a comedy room, called Up Next, which I used to do [pre-COVID lockdown],” she says.

However, she’s also had her father accompanying her to open mics. “I’d go straight from school in Bendigo all the way to Melbourne and turn up to a bar in my school uniform or get changed at the train station toilet,” she says. “My Dad loves it because he gets to live a bit vicariously through me”.

This time together over the past couple of years has not only been “a really great bonding experience” but has paid off in terms of career advancement. “Through that I met Damien Richardson, who I’m now doing a show with in the Comedy Festival,” she says of the opening support slot he’s given her in his show It Could Get Worse.

Supportive teachers play an equally important role, as it is often they who suggest the program to students in the first place. For Fawcett, who “mucked around in class a lot”, it was her teacher Ellen-Kate Waayers who took her to Class Clowns.

“She was extremely supportive,” says Fawcett, who also credits her former drama teacher Kirstie Babbage with inspiring her to pursue comedy. “They are the people who taught me to be a little bit funny and gave me the opportunity.”

For Annie Louey, who left her career in the corporate world and now lives off comedy full-time, Class Clowns helped show her that comedy is “a real career path and you can make it viable”. She says “you have to work your butt off for a long time but if you persist, one day you’ll work with your heroes and achieve things you never thought possible”.

CLASS CLOWNS ALUMNI

ANNIE LOUEY

Class Clowns National Finalist 2010 at age 17

What kind of material did you perform then?

I used comedy material as a form of expression and rebellion. It was so liberating to be able to talk openly about things that annoyed me, especially when I had traditional Chinese parents. I talked about the ginormous sandwiches my Mum would make me for school ... I played out a scene where my Mum taped two pieces of bread around a head of lettuce and called it lunch.

2021 MICF Show: Comedy Commutes, Brunswick Apr 1

PATRICK COLLINS

National Finalist 2011 at age 17

Material?

I sang a love song to an audience member about being trapped in their basement and talked about how my classmates thought I was gay. I should have seen the signs because now all my material is about the fact that I’m queer.

2021 Show: I’m Not a Mime, The Butterfly Club April 5-18

TOM BALLARD

National Finalist 2004 & 2005, starting at 14

Material?

Oh god. I remember having a routine about automatic toilets and I think at one point I talked about how homework was bad. Pretty edgy stuff.

2021 Show: We Are All In This, Melbourne Town Hall Mar 25 – April 18

www.comedyfestival.com.au

The Age is a partner of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.