Geraldine Hickey realised she had a career in comedy when she was a teenager.
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It was a high school drama class, Hickey recalled, and she’d just performed a rare piece of “serious acting”.
The class erupted in laughter.
“My drama teacher said to me ‘You’re meant to be a comedian’,” Hickey said.
A decade and a half later, Hickey says she feels that she is just hitting her stride in her career.
Hickey was part of the 1 per cent of the world that didn’t hate the year of 2016.
In fact, it was quite a prosperous one for her.
On the career front, she scored a gig hosting at Melbourne radio station RRR – “I survived my first year and got asked back, which is pretty cool” – she performed in a couple of festival slots, and had a successful Melbourne International Comedy Festival.
But on the bucket-list front, she also excelled.
“I went scuba diving, for the first time, that was a highlight of 2016,” Hickey said.
“I also got my first tattoo, which I wasn’t planning on getting.”
In between not surfing (Hickey started 2017 with a bang and bought a surfboard, but admits she has only used it once) and hosting RRR, Hickey is putting the finishing touches on her show for this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival.
Launceston audiences will get the chance to see it ahead of the festival when Hickey ducks down to Tasmania on February 17, to headline Fresh Comedy.
Most of Hickey’s comedy is about finding the silliness and funny in every day, sometimes boring, situations.
Although, she said, she has had to change tack slightly since becoming a radio host.
“I feel like I’ve told most of my childhood stories already and now I’ll just go out and experience as much as I can,” Hickey said.
“I’ll say yes to any opportunity that comes up. Doing things like getting a tattoo when I had no plans to. I was at a tattoo convention and I saw the artist, I knew the artist, I said ‘Hey, how’s it going? That’s a pretty picture, let’s do this’.”
Catch Hickey at Fresh Comedy on February 17, from 9pm, at the Royal Oak Hotel. Tickets are on sale now at trybooking.com for $20 reserved seating, and $15 for general admission.
