AJ Lamarque has a tendency to laugh at his jokes. Granted, he has his finger on the pulse, tackles sharp topics with softness, and knows his way around a relatable anecdote. But Lamarque is also positively bubbling with, well, positivity.
He wears many hats: comedian, MC, producer, mentor, creative and communicator. Sometimes, those hats are sequinned; sometimes, they’re paired with glittering drop earrings. But at his monthly Kweens of Comedy show at Darlinghurst’s Oxford Hotel, his most stylish accessory is his smile: broad and easily erupting with laughter. That smile – “My mouth was the first thing to grow, and then my head was still small and childish, so I had this weird Luna Park-entrance type-thing” – serves as an immediate icebreaker for audiences.
AJ Lamarque is a rising star on the comedy scene who hosts a Kweens of Comedy show at Darlinghurst’s Oxford Hotel.Credit:Dominic Lorrimer
“I like to think there’s a bit of interconnection, in comedy in general – and I think that’s a benefit of comedy as an art form – but also particularly at Kweens: that feeling of engagement and connectivity with the audience and performers, and that whole vibe creates a community feel,” he says. “Even if people can’t relate to being me directly, I like to think that people feel like they’re in on the joke.”
Community is his goal. Lamarque launched the ensemble stand-up show in 2019, to create a more inclusive, less segregated space on the Sydney comedy scene. Line-ups have included Cassie Workman, Ruby Teys, Harry Jun and The Noodle Girls. Fundamentally, Lamarque says Kweens is about our shared humanity.
“Each show varies in a lot of demographics, and I feel like if I did the whole, ‘Woo if you identify with these people’, you’d just go on hearing woos for hours,” he says. “Which is really exciting because it means that what I was trying to do with the room is working.”
Having grown up in a mixed-race family (his mother is Anglo British; his father is Chinese-Jamaican-Indian-South African) in London, and as a gay man, Lamarque knows what it means to navigate various identities. He moved from diverse downtown London to a predominantly white suburban neighbourhood outside the city in his early teens; years of navigating others treating him as “the odd one out” only strengthened his sense of self.
“You either go with the things put towards you, or you rebel against it completely, and I think I did the rebellion,” he says, laughing. “I never looked at myself and thought, ‘Oh, I’m bad’. I thought, ‘Oh, I’m great and everyone is jealous’, so maybe I was destined to be a performer.”
Those experiences helped him develop “a bit more of wanting to make people feel welcome”, he says. “That experience and how I navigated that and the space I ended up in afterwards are definitely the underlying principles of not just how I view comedy but also how I view other aspects of my life … That comes out in the things I do and the way I see situations.”
Lamarque also created the Newcomers Program – “a crash course in how to perform comedy”, targeting new and diverse voices – and performs at the Comedy Store. He is a member of the Australian Council for the Arts 2022-2023 Future Leaders program, an appointment he hopes to use to explore what it means to do comedy in Australia.
“I’m excited to represent comedy in a very artist-led way,” he says. “There are so many comedians that I know who spend so much time really thinking about their craft, reworking materials, doing performances – a lot of the time for free – just to understand the craft better … and I feel like that should be represented more.”
In April, Lamarque will have his first solo show “in many years”, at the Sydney Comedy Festival. Exploring how Lamarque navigates the world, English Breakfast is “a really cute analogy for me as a person”.
“It’s a very British tea with lots of different teas from different parts of the world, and I thought that was very synonymous with my own cultural identity,” he says. “My Dad, my sister and myself, we’d put milk in [the tea] until it matched our skin.”
Lamarque turns 30 this year, and his Australian citizenship will be finalised in 2023. What would he say to that sassy, resilient 11-year-old, if given the chance?
“Call me superstitious, but I wouldn’t want to affect anything that would change my perspective on how I view humanity overall,” he says, before pausing. “I’d tell him to be a little bit more sassy to authority; he can go a little bit harder, he can get away with it.”
English Breakfast is at the Factory Theatre, Marrickville, from April 28 to May 1. Kweens of Comedy runs monthly at the Oxford Hotel, Darlinghurst.
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