In an age of self-deprecation, the former cabaret star is infuriating fellow standups by calling herself 'Australia's first attractive comedian' - and flaunting her sex appeal on stage.
Is Elouise Eftos really Australia's first attractive comedian? Her fellow countryman Sam Campbell has boyish charm, after all - and in some of those frocks, even Dame Edna cut quite the dash. But if you're thinking in these terms - if you're taking the claim at face value - you've already got the title to Eftos's hit standup show all wrong. You wouldn't be the first. "I had fellow comedians telling me, 'You shouldn't call yourself that,'" says Eftos. "I found that so fascinating and sad, that I was told I was stepping out of line just for using this silly title." She pauses. "Comedians are some of the most serious people I've met in my life. I do find it funny that they can't take a joke."
Eftos speaks from the vantage point of the outsider - as a still-recent arrival in comedy, and because of her Greek-Macedonian heritage, palpably a significant thing for her when we talk over a video-call while she holidays after the Edinburgh fringe. From that perspective, she rips into comedy and its macho myths in her show ("Everyone tells you how hard it's going to be [to do comedy] ... It's not that hard at all"), and publicly airs her beef with several prominent comics, too. Titled Australia's First Attractive Comedian, the set secured for the 33-year-old a best newcomer nomination in Edinburgh, making gleeful play in the uncomfortable space between comedy, feminism and sex appeal.
It was, I say to Eftos, one of those shows you can't believe hasn't been made before - so fertile is its territory for comedy, so uncomfortable (clearly, still, for some) the inquiry: "Can you be both funny and sexy?" You might have thought that question had long since been resolved: there are no shortage of good-looking comics, after all. "But in Australia," says Eftos, "everybody’s doing self-deprecating humour and dressing down. Nobody’s talking about how good-looking they are on stage. The fact that I don’t do self-deprecating comedy rubbed people up the wrong way."
Prior to life as a comedian, Eftos was an actor, and an MC in a cabaret with "a Pussycat Dolls vibe. The whole shtick was high status, 'You can't touch us up here.' It was sexy and funny and strong." So when she moved to Sydney and took up live comedy ("How else am I going to get on stage? How else am I going to get my name out there?"), performing as a glam siren supremely confident in her own sexiness felt like an obvious way to go.
It took chutzpah. "I am obviously confident on stage," says Eftos,"but I also have self-doubt." You'd never guess when watching the show, which begins with a homage to Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct and just gets sexier. Or sillier: one of its most fantastic qualities is that you're never certain what's a joke and what's a brassy statement of fact. Do "couples in the crowd", as Eftos would have it, "look at me as the other woman who's about to steal their husband when I walk out on stage"? And does she really consider herself so superior to we "normies" in her audience? - whose supposed erotic excitement at the very sight of her is animated in a hilarious running joke.
The character is, says Eftos,"a heightened version of me. Except,I’m a very anxious person in real life." The flak her act has drawn - from veteran female entertainers including (greatly to Eftos’s alarm) Nia Vardalos of My Big Fat Greek Wedding fame - can only have added to that anxiety. But Eftos confronts that criticism head-on in the show, taking the attack right back to the sceptics. "I don’t mean to have a go at them," she says,"but I try and encourage us all to think differently. I can only imagine what they went through, getting into comedy as women in the 80s and 90s. But my experience isn’t that different. And it doesn’t mean I’m a bad person or a bad comedian just because I wear a dress on stage and you can see my nipples."
She goes on: "As a woman, and as a woman in comedy, you're always being told, 'Don't be too attractive.' And even though the title doesn't refer specifically to female comedians, female comic friends of mine would say, 'Well, that's how people will interpret it, so you shouldn't say it.'" Is it an act of feminist betrayal to foreground, or send up, your own attractiveness? "What roles do you have to play to please society?" asks Eftos. "To please men? Versus this whole idea that if you're a real feminist, you mustn't do anything to please men." Alongside the big laughs, her show engages thoughtfully with those questions, receiving acclaim for doing so.
"I had a dream run," says Eftos now of her fringe show, the goal of which was to secure UK management and profile, prior to a London move. "They get my sense of humour more over here," says an act who cut her comedy teeth watching "Benny Hill, French and Saunders, Monty Python - all the old-school British comedy". Now a follow-up standup show is brewing: "My next hour will focus on the fact that I've never been in love and I don't think it's real," she says, tantalisingly.
The comedy world, at least, now seems to be falling for Australia's First Attractive Comedian - and she couldn't be happier. "I'm so grateful I get to do this as a job. I'd love to be performing live for the rest of my life."