This Show Is A Joke!

For well over 35 million years (give or take), The Listies have been spreading laughter across the globe (including the oceans). Their shows have become a staple of Australian family theatre and a hilarious first step into live performance for generations of kids and their grown-ups.

The Listies, aka Richard Higgins and Matt Kelly, formed during the latest Ice Age (2008) to perform absurdist comedy to elderly people (i.e. 18+) but switched to full time kids comedy in 2011. They have never looked back (plus the hours are heaps better).

To date, they have claimed to have written 10-ish award-winning & critically acclaimed live shows, collaborated with most major theatre companies and festivals in Australia, toured three continents, recorded FOUR albums, and published four books with Penguin and two more with Scholastic are the way. Though we only have their word for it. Oh, and their PODCAST has over 460,000 downloads but most of that could be Matt’s Dad trying to work out how to use the internet.

On screen you can see them iview ABC with their shows Art Blast, and What’s With The Listies, and also occasionally in the background of outside weather broadcasts. They have loads of vids on their youtube page as well as a strong social media presence.

They performed over 120 shows a year to tens of thousands of people all over Australia and the UK. Nearly all of them stayed awake and only some of them vomited. Recently, in what may have been an administrative error, they won the Best Children’s Show at the Melbourne Fringe Festival.

In the past they have received a Sydney Theatre Award, ‘The HarperCollins Best Designed Children’s Fiction Book’, and the Best Independent show (Golden Gibbo Award) at Melbourne International Comedy Festival, (and they are still the only kids act to have been nomed for the Comedy Festival’s ‘Best Show’ award). They have watched LITERALLY every episode of the Great British Bake Off.