Australian comedian, TV and radio host Joel Creasey returns to New Zealand this month for his first show in Aotearoa in over a decade. To mark the occasion, he talks to Oliver Hall about visiting Graham Norton’s house, why Minogues don’t sweat, and remembering his fearless teenage self in overwhelming times.
When Joel Creasey talks about comedy, he talks about work. Not in the grindset way — more “you’ve paid for a ticket, I’ll do the heavy lifting!” It’s why he promises there’ll be no crowd work when he lands in Christchurch for the Rainbow Theatre Festival at The Court Theatre — and no sneaky TED Talk disguised as stand-up, either.
“The safest place to be at one of my shows is the front row,” he tells us. “It’s a mental vacation, where you don’t have to think for an hour.”
Creasey is coming to Ōtautahi for the first time — not just visiting, but actually performing — as part of The Court Theatre’s Pride weekend injection of comedy, cabaret and queer chaos that’s become one of the festival’s most joyful annual fixtures.
This will be the first time Creasey has performed in New Zealand in over a decade, which is surprising, as he estimates he has visited our shores about 40 times in those 10 years. His home country has been keeping him busy. He’s a familiar face across TV and radio in Australia, including eight years as Australia’s Eurovision commentator, which feels less like a job and more like a personality type.
But this particular trip comes with a small existential sting: Creasey started stand-up at 16, and this year he turns 36. “So I’m going to come guns blazing — all out — and give you the best hour of stand-up that I have.”
It’s not an empty promise. Early in his career, he toured with Joan Rivers — the GOAT, in his words — and still carries one of her bluntest bits of advice like a lucky coin. “If you’ve got the microphone, you’ve already won — just don’t fuck it up from there.”
Rivers also gave him something softer, and arguably harder to live by: “Just laugh and everything will be okay.” Creasey admits it sounds basic, but in 2026 — when the news cycle often feels like a fire alarm — it feels like great advice.
The Graham Norton connection
Interviewing comedians is a bit like opening a wardrobe: you might be searching for one outfit, but a completely different story falls out and hits you in the face. In Creasey’s case, it’s Graham Norton’s house.
“I haven’t really told many people this,” he says, and then casually drops that he once went to Norton’s place in London, “just by Tower Bridge.” The invite came via his ex — actor Jeffrey Self — and even though Self actually knew Norton, both men arrived jittery enough to do what any sensible gay would do: stop at every pub on the way there for a drink.
When they finally got to the house, Alan Carr was there. Naturally. Then, three hours into the evening — after enough liquid courage to power a small Pride parade — Creasey asked who else lived nearby.
“Oh, Helen Mirren is my next-door neighbour,” Norton told him.
Creasey describes clasping his pearls and emitting a gay gasp “that could be heard from Mars.” Norton offered to text Mirren and see if she’d pop over. She was in Portugal filming, which is perhaps the only acceptable reason to miss that kind of invitation.
As if that wasn’t already ridiculous enough, Creasey then ended up seeing Norton regularly through Eurovision: their commentary boxes were next to each other, Norton was “on the wines” (Creasey is still unsure how that works logistically), and the two compared jokes — including whether they’d both landed on the same Madonna eyepatch/pink-eye gag.
Sweating at Mardi Gras
Creasey’s Christchurch show lands in the context of Pride season — not just Christchurch Pride, but that wider trans-Tasman rhythm of queer summer that includes Sydney Mardi Gras. And this year, Mardi Gras comes with a heartbreak footnote: the organisation has “paused” the Mardi Gras PARTY for 2026.
Creasey is gutted. He hosted Mardi Gras for five years and describes it as the ultimate live-TV boot camp — hitting marks, spinning to camera, throwing to shots over your shoulder — all while 400 floats roll by behind you and you’ve got about 20 seconds to clock what’s worth naming.
And then there are the after-parties. Creasey’s eyes sparkle when he tells the story of his peak rock ’n’ roll moment: it’s 3am at Hordern Pavilion, sweat is dripping off the ceiling, Cher is onstage “humping a cannon”, and he’s standing at the back with Dannii Minogue in what he calls “gay heaven.”
Creasey is sweating through his suit but refuses to take it off — “because I look like a paperclip wearing skin” — while Dannii, in a floor-length silk gown, isn’t sweating at all. When he asks how, she turns and says: “Oh babe, please. Minogues don’t sweat!”
The following year, he interviewed Kylie and couldn’t resist repeating the story, adding one professional-sounding question at the end: could she confirm Minogues don’t sweat? Kylie replied, without missing a beat: “Minogues only sweat glitter.”
His story feels like a love letter to queer festivals: where you experience history and hedonism in the same breath. That’s why Creasey has little patience for the predictable “why do you need a whole month?” crowd. Look at the history, he says. Look at what’s happening now. And if it offends you? “Don’t attend. Watch Antiques Roadshow on the couch, or whatever makes you happy.”
A Gutsy 16-year-old
For all the glamour in these tales, Creasey’s most affecting story is the one that starts with a 16-year-old Joel entering a stand-up competition.
If he began today, he says, he doesn’t think he’d do it. The world is louder and the scrutiny sharper. But at 16, he had a kind of reckless bravery — and a lot of favours to ask of his parents. Because the competition took place in a licensed venue, they had to drive him, sign him in, and keep doing that for the next two years, until he turned 18.
And at the same time, he had to come out to them, because so much of his material relied on his lived experience as a gay teenager.
“I reckon coming out to your parents as a stand-up comic is arguably harder than coming out to your parents as gay,” he jokes, because the stand-up part is the one that makes parents truly panic. His mum’s response to his sexuality was wonderfully underwhelming (“Cool… and we’re having pasta for dinner”), which he insists was “the most homophobic thing you could say — because I’m gay now, I can’t eat carbs anymore.”
Under the punchline, though, is the idea of diving in, making mistakes, flopping, and trying again. Creasey tells us in tough times he thinks back to being that brave 16-year-old and realises if he could do it back then, he can do it again.
And in a year that already feels like it’s asked a lot of us, that’s a mantra worth repeating: be brave and back yourself — even when you’re still figuring out the punchline.
