Aunty Donna's Vision: Creating an Australian Comedy Hub Like Netflix

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In 2014, Aunty Donna’s promising comedy career was on a knife-edge.

After being nominated for the prestigious Golden Gibbo award for their first live show, the then-four-person sketch comedy crew were down a member and questioning whether they could work as a trio.

To add salt to the wound, the venue they’d been put in for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival was on the fringes of the CBD, far away from all the action.

“It was an impasse where it’s like: this is either going to fall apart or gain momentum,” Broden Kelly says of how he and the other two performing members of the group were feeling at the time.

Four young men in black suits sitting on a couch and laughing

In the early years of their comedy career, Aunty Donna performed as a quartet. Credit: Isabelle Clara Mason

After “white-knuckling it” to create a show they were really proud of, SBS Comedy gave them a less-than-favourable review.

“They hated it,” Mark Samual Bonanno recalls.

“We had a sit-down on Lygon Street and we went around a circle and said something we like about each other — that’s how much it affected us.”

While that two-star review knocked their confidence, Zachary Ruane credits it with being “a very important step in our journey”.

“The big lesson that we got out of it was that we might work really hard to get on that stage and to make a good thing, but when people come and watch us, they’ve just worked hard at probably something that matters a lot more than what we do,” he says.

“They don’t come to us to see us working hard; they come to us to forget about the hard work they’ve just done, to forget about their struggles … so we need to just get up there and have fun.

“That kind of conversation and that realisation, I think, informed so much of what we do.”

Finding non-traditional pathways to success

A decade on, and Aunty Donna — made up of writers and performers Bonanno, Kelly, and Ruane, along with head writer and stage director Sam Lingham, director Max Miller, and composer Thomas Zahariou — have toured all over the world, created two TV shows, released a studio album, worked with the likes of Shaun Micalleff, Tony Martin and Weird Al Yankovic, and published a colouring book.

Much of that success is thanks to the loyal following they built online through their YouTube channel, which boasts more than 639,000 subscribers, their self-titled podcast and their Patreon.

“When we were starting, there were three or four people at festivals and networks that had to like what you did, and if they didn’t like what you did, then good luck to you,” Ruane says.

“We were kind of the first generation that were then able to go: ‘Well, you don’t like us, but we’ll go find an audience’.”

With 2018’s Always Room for Christmas Pud, a largely improvised sketch that is perhaps Aunty Donna’s most well-known, they had their first taste of something approaching virality.

The original upload has amassed over 4.3 million views on YouTube and Pud has also become a running gag and annual cultural celebration amongst their fans, spawning a pannettone version (a nod to Bonanno’s Italian heritage), a family-friendly version, a picture book, and a mockumentary about the making of the sketch.

While the group’s vast body of work is varied in its themes and tone, their brilliance lies in their ability to take a universal experience — like dealing with horrible real estate agents, forgetting to take your reusable bags to the shops, trying to have a picnic as an adult, and offloading cake at the end of a party — and add an absurdist and oftentimes dark edge to it.

One thing Aunty Donna generally steers clear of is being overtly political.

But Kelly rejects the idea that they’re “never saying anything”.

“I really struggle with that because I think everything that we are doing is really saying something really simple, and that is that ‘If you’re a man, it’s okay to look silly or to be stupid. It’s okay to be weird’,” he says.

“The world I lean into now with footy [Kelly hosts an AFL podcast] as well, there’s so much negativity and putting down and just sort of tropes that are masculine, and just trying to reaffirm by setting the example that it doesn’t have to be that way.

“We do that a lot with our stuff — but I think if things are too didactic or too instructional, you do lose a lot of people, when you could be getting them.”

Given how many Australian references are littered throughout Aunty Donna’s work (everything from Hey, Hey, it’s Saturday to Eagle Boys Pizza), it’s perhaps surprising that global streaming giant Netflix was willing to give them their own show before any local TV networks.

Aunty Donna’s Big Ol’ House of Fun, which was co-produced by Office star Ed Helms’ company Pacific Electric Picture Company, was also the only time they were given free rein to make the show they wanted.

“Every other time, it was very heavily: ‘You can’t just do what you want to do. It has to be this, it has to tick all these boxes,’ Bonanno says.

Kelly adds: “Often we’ve seen in places we’ve made shows before that the shows they make need to be for everyone at one time, and there’s an argument that’s not the best representation of diversity … maybe it’s giving chances to diverse people to represent what they want to represent, as opposed to putting a square peg in a round hole.”

A woman and five men with expressions of shock and astonishment on their faces. Three of the men are dressed in court robes and wigs, while another is dressed in a blue burglar's outfit.

Aunty Donna’s Coffee Café, the TV series they produced for the ABC, featured a long list of guest start including Rake star Richard Roxburgh (centre) and Matt Doran (second from left), who played Mouse in The Matrix. Source: Supplied / ABC

Asked if they felt they needed to make it overseas to be taken seriously back home, Aunty Donna doesn’t pull any punches.

“It’s almost like we don’t need to answer that question; the world answered the question for us,” Ruane says.

Bonanno adds: “That is Australia. That’s music, that’s TV, that’s comedy, that’s all the arts in Australia is. We don’t tend to lift people up until overseas says ‘This is great’.”

Building a ‘mini Netflix for Australian comedy’

The risk-averse nature of the local screen industry has prompted Aunty Donna to invest their own money in nurturing talent that doesn’t necessarily fit a mainstream mould, through their production company Haven’t You Done Well and comedy network Grouse House.

“We kind of entrepreneurially just saw that there was a hole in the market and that every network in the country was not doing their job in platforming really good people,” Kelly says.

“We just thought: ‘Let’s see if we can build something that can eventually compete,’ so we’ve hired a whole team around us who are building this platform and building out shows and rollouts, and it’s really fun to watch.”

While they’re starting small by funding comedians they’ve worked with in the past, including Demi Lardner and Greg Larsen, they hope in the long-term that Grouse House can become a “mini Netflix for Australian comedy”.

“We see these people that are really, really good … they just need that opportunity,” Ruane says of their desire to help other Australian comedians create sustainable careers.

“As we grow that community out and fold more people in, hopefully, eventually we get to a place where [people say] ‘Well, if Grouse House is doing it, then it’s good’.

“The goal would be that there are fans of Grouse House in five years’ time that have never heard of Aunty Donna, they just love that brand.”

The end of an era

Never ones to rest on their laurels, Aunty Donna are back out on the road with DREM, their first live show in two years.

The show promises to be as silly and energy-filled as audiences have come to expect from the group, while also offering something new.

“I would argue that DREM is our freest show when it comes to the ideas that are in it and how we’ve kind of put the show together. Production-wise, I’m the most excited about [it] because we are doing stuff that we have never done before,” Bonanno says.

Aunty Donna’s live shows are known for being a high octane, assault on the senses — in the best kind of way. Source: Getty / Roberto Ricciuti

It’s also the first time in their career that they don’t have any plans about when they’ll tour again.

“We’re kind of okay with the idea we won’t be touring after this for a little bit because, for me at least, it feels like a real bookmark of this era where we learned all these lessons about how to make audiences laugh,” Kelly says.

Ruane adds: “It’s nice to just have a bit of ambiguity there. We haven’t had that for a long time.”

Aunty Donna is touring DREM around Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, the UK, the US and Canada until late December.