Interview: Zoë Coombs Marr's show began as a backstage joke

Dave, the mediocre male stand-up created by Zoë Coombs Marr, is back at the Fringe '“ and discovering his inner lesbian

Dave, the hapless male comedian who is the alter ego of Zoë Coombs Marr, began as a backstage joke.

“I was doing a lot of stand-up in clubs as myself – but Dave had been brewing,” says Coombs Marr.

“I used to do it in down time to make the techies laugh.”

Dave, a wannabe comic whose lacklustre observations tend to begin: “What’s the deal with….”, is a paragon of failed masculinity, a hack comic without the wit and the smarts to make his observations stick.

But he’s been a winner for Coombs Marr, who landed the Barry, Australia’s top comedy award, for Trigger Warning – which sees Dave embrace the Gaulier method of clowning only to discover his true comic self is a thirtysomething lesbian, very much like the real Zoë Coombs Marr.

“Originally he was called Joey. He became Dave because there were so many Daves in Australian ­comedy. At Melbourne Comedy Festival, where I listed him as Dave, rather than under my own name, he was on a page where there were eight other Daves.”

Trigger Warning becomes a struggle between Dave and Zoë, between the male comic creation and the woman who is behind him.

“I haven’t done stand-up as myself for about five years – so this is
me returning to stand-up and about the struggle between me and Dave.”

But surely the odds are weighted in favour of Zoë?

Not necessarily, she says. “I love Dave. I have very real genuine affection for him.

“When I have a gap and I’m not doing Dave for a while, I really miss him. That’s why I keep going back to him. I wouldn’t do that for a character I really hated.”

So who is Dave?