Elouise Eftos, self-dubbed “Australia’s First Attractive Comedian”, is trying to steal an art deco-style floor lamp from an inner-city theatre foyer. “It’s just for my show,” she says, wrenching the unwieldy, weighty form across the carpet. “Actually, can someone help me? I shouldn’t have to do this on my own.”
Minutes before, sitting in the theatre’s upper balcony with a delighted smile, Eftos had been high-kicking her legs like an off-duty Moulin Rouge dancer. A bunch of seen-it-all roadies unloading speakers, subwoofers and coils of cabling on the stage below had stopped in their tracks when she’d stood up and waved.
“Hi, hello, missed you,” she’d called out before whipping through some pin-sharp, photo-shoot turns and poses. The roadies waved back, awestruck into silence. “Ah,” Eftos says, flicking a curl back before twirling into a sashaying walk. “A day in the life of Australia’s first attractive comedian”.
To meet Eftos in full throttle is to be dazzled. Her live comedy has variously been described as provocative, feminist and sexy but also a whip-smart amalgamation of uber-high-status shtick and tongue-in-cheek future superstar.
In her recent award-winning show, Australia’s First Attractive Comedian – its poster featuring Eftos in a white bikini reminiscent of Ursula Andress in Dr No – she tackled the views of men in the comedy industry who told her she was too attractive to be in comedy. Rather than agreeing, she developed a heightened stand-up version of herself – someone so hot she could “literally be doing anything else” – plus male fantasy characters (“the bookworm”, “the beach babe”) and a fembot to close the show.
As she says in the show’s opening scene – a parody of Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct’s infamous leg-crossing scene – “I’d have to be pretty stupid to call myself Australia’s first attractive comedian and actually think that I am Australia’s first attractive comedian.” Pause. “It’s not my fault that people think it’s true.”
Eftos’s description of her comedy is that it’s punk rock. “I think people don’t want to admit it,” she says. “It’s quite groundbreaking to be a woman doing comedy that doesn’t do self-deprecating humour, who doesn’t talk down about herself. It’s quite a punk-rock statement.
“Also, because I wear little dresses on stage and it seems quite feminine or maybe sexy, it gets diminished to be, ‘oh, you’re a silly girl, you’re not doing anything to change people’s perceptions of women, or comedy, or women doing comedy’. I think I am. Because I’m a woman presenting feminine it’s almost as if it’s not considered as groundbreaking as it is. I think that is a very, very interesting double standard.”
Eftos’ comedy spurred some established female comedians to call her anti-feminist or regressive. In 2024 Nia Vardalos, the creator of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, said – and later retracted – that Eftos was “taking us back to the dark ages”.
The comedian was undeterred, using the experiences as part of her show. “I can understand why women doing comedy in the ’80s and ’90s felt like they had to dress down or not look too glam,” she says. “They probably didn’t feel safe backstage. But, for me, it’s almost like a protest.
“My comedy is very post-#MeToo. Me backstage wearing a dress where I’m not wearing a bra, and I’m wearing heels and I look the way that I look, I hope the men backstage feel uncomfortable. Yes, you should be thinking three times before you say something to me about my dress or about my body or about my comedy. You should be thinking about that because I don’t think men take enough time to do so.”
Eftos’ star is rising with alacrity. In 2025 she won four comedy awards in Australia and New Zealand and was nominated for best newcomer at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. She opened for Aunty Donna at the 3000-seat Hammersmith Apollo in October, sold out the Soho Theatre in the heart of London and, in March this year, took a season of Australia’s First Attractive Comedian to the SoHo Playhouse in New York.
“Getting the Edinburgh nomination changed my life,” she says. “I went in there with the lowest expectations because everyone says, ‘oh, you’re going to go into debt, you’re going to hate it, you’re going to get two people in the audience, you’re going to be giving out flyers in the rain’. And then I got there and it was like I was Elle Woods [in Legally Blonde]. I was like, ‘Oh, it’s hard?’”
She worked her guts out like most performers at the Fringe but, she says, the hardest part of doing Edinburgh was some of the other comics. “I’d gotten used to the way comedians were quite prejudiced towards me in Australia,” she says. “That was what the show was about. But I forgot that in a way, and then it was happening to me again but with the British scene: people not knowing me and judging me and treating me in this weird way. It was like a social experiment.”
Luckily, she was sharing accommodation with a group of Australian and New Zealand comedians, including Emma Holland, Ray O’Leary and brothers Guy and Paul Williams, who kept her sane. After the newcomer nomination announcement, Holland hand-sewed herself a special backless tartan top.
“I didn’t expect to win, and I didn’t, but it was such an amazing time,” Eftos says. “Then I found out I was the first Australian woman nominated for the newcomer award. With that show. A show about the comedy industry, about how it made people question who I am and what I do. It was just very surreal.”
Later this year the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts graduate is moving to the UK to further the stand-up career she began in 2017. “Australia will always be home but I think London’s the centre of the comedy universe right now,” she says. “So many incredible comedians are coming out of there at the moment.”
Before moving into comedy and winning the 2018 Raw Comedy state final in her home town of Perth, she worked as a dancer-performer. “I MC’d sexy cabaret burlesque shows I sang and danced in,” she says. “I’ve never felt more powerful than when I was in those shows. Yes, there’s moments where you’re dancing in lingerie. But I would start the show with such a ‘you can’t f— with us’, ‘you can’t touch us up here’ attitude.”
It’s partly why she wields such confidence as a stand-up – and doesn’t hesitate to remove badly behaved audience members from live gigs. She also attributes her on-stage boldness and comic chops to family.
“I get a lot of my humour from my dad.” she says. “He was a bit in shock, as a wog man, when he saw my show. Like, ‘where did that come from?’ I don’t even know. It’s not me. Off-stage I get quite anxious. I go, ‘oh, I hope that wasn’t too much’, and then I try and be really nice to people in the green room because I want them to know it was just a joke. And then I think, ‘why am I doing this? Why am I trying to make everyone comfortable?’ I don’t want to make people feel uncomfortable to the point where they’re scared to be backstage with me. But also, isn’t it so interesting that’s my default position? I don’t like that. I’m trying to unlearn that.”
For her next show, Aphrodite, Eftos is turning the spotlight on love. Setting the action in the goddess of love’s discotheque, she’s also talking about her own Greek-Macedonian heritage and exploring the fact she’s never been in love. “People get shocked when I say that on stage,” she says of recent work-in-progress runs. “I don’t think many people know what love is. I think people are lying half the time.
“Then, when I say, ‘I don’t really ask guys out’, I’m really still the girl in high school that was bullied. I have this confidence on stage but whenever men have treated me in a certain way it’s hard not to pull up that wall and just feel like, what’s the point?”
Generally, Eftos believes people have lost the ability to connect because life is funnelled through screens. She perceives a creeping conservatism that has made people, especially men, cautious about showing vulnerability.
“I do a lot of material in Aphrodite about how men are scared of dancing and letting themselves loose,” she says. “I’ve been getting men up on stage to dance with me and you can see this fear of looking gay or looking too feminine or people just looking at them. There’s this kind of scary, avoidant culture. We’re so separate. We used to go and meet the opposite sex on a dance floor and dance and be free. But we don’t do that any more.”
It’s feels like a serious topic but Eftos has the knack of infusing weighty topics with humour that opens people’s minds. She remembers seeing this effect at her Edinburgh shows when she’d farewell each audience member at the end of the show.
“All these middle-aged men were shaking my hand, going, ‘that was very thought-provoking, that was a very, very interesting take, I’m a feminist now’. I thought, if I’ve tricked these men to see the show because I’m wearing a bikini and I look like a Bond girl and they’ve become feminist because of it, well, that’s a great thing,” she says. “I’ve done my job.”
Elouise Eftos, Aphrodite, is at Arts Centre Melbourne, April 7-19, at the Factory Theatre, Sydney, May 6-8, and at Bondi Pavilion, May 9-10.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
