It’s been four years, a pandemic and two seasons of his US show Everything’s Gonna Be Okay since Josh Thomas last toured Australian stages, with 2019’s Whoopsie Daisy. Though he started in standup as a teen (winning Melbourne international comedy festival’s Raw Comedy competition at 17), Thomas jettisoned that part of his practice once he’d made the move to TV in 2013, with his sweet, spiky, deliciously awkward and surprisingly touching series Please Like Me. Thomas has been fairly candid over the years about preferring the small screen as a vehicle for his material, saying that he’ll only put together a new standup show if he has something to say.
Whoopsie Daisy was mostly about the culture shock of moving to Los Angeles in the wake of Please Like Me’s surprise US success; he’d done the twink pool parties and the Hollywood meetings, and had a swag of loopy anecdotes to prove it – but he was also characteristically candid about his discomfort, and even unhappiness, in his new social milieu.
