A group of Sunshine Coast seniors are going to challenge the perceptions surrounding aging and for the first time in their lives do a stand-up comedy routine in front of 200 people today.

The four men and six women have undertaken an intensive two-day workshop this week to prepare them for what could be considered the hardest audience to crack.

They are performing at the "Shooting from my hip replacement" comedy performance which is part of Seniors Week celebrations.

Jane Scarrat, Fred Purches and Malcom Brough are part of the group who have not stopped laughing since they started their stand-up comedy course with comedian Mandy Nolan on Monday.

They are looking forward to their debut performance with gusto now they've been taught there is an art and structure to routines.

"It is stand-up comedy, it is not telling jokes," Mr Purches said. "It is about telling something about ourselves, adding sarcasm and slight exaggeration."

And they don't seem too concerned about their first gig - as they say, you don't worry about making a fool of yourself when you're older.

Ms Scarrett said laughter was the best medicine in the world and while they may be considered senior, they were all 20 on the inside.

"We are trying to put humour into our own lives and I am going to mention the word fart lots," she said.

Mr Brough said many in the audience would understand the routines because it would be about everyday life.

I get up in the morning and look in the mirror and you have to have a laugh," he said.

Mandy Nolan, who has been a stand-up comeidan for 15 years and a trainer for six years, said one of the best things about her business was that it delved into people's lives and uncovered their uniqueness.

"There is already something extraordinary about ordinary lives and often we don't think of that or expect it to be unique or funny," Ms Nolan said.

"This is about people pushing themselves outside their comfort zone and we have to be prepared to expose ourselves. A lot of people here are seniors but don't think of themselves as that - they are just as cheeky as some of the young ones - and they don't do their homework either."

Unfortunately the performance is sold out, but the group may think about doing a Christmas gig - so watch this space.

Funny Girl - The tragicomic life of Mandy Nolan - Paradise Magazine - February 24-25, 2007

Byron Bay-based Mandy Nolan has performed stand-up comedy for 18 years. She teaches comedy, runs festivals, is a skilled conference facilitator and emcee, an acclaimed artist, newspaper entertainment editor, appears regularly on TV and radio and is a happily married mother of three - that's the 'front story'. But when Rebecca Ovenden meets her in a Bangalow cafe, she reveals her 'back story' - one where laughter was used to drown tragedy's gutteral screams.

Mandy Nolan grew up in a small house in Wondai in Queensland's South Burnett region.

The modest dwelling had a couple of positives going for it. Firstly, it was made of fibro which buckled so easily under the weight of powerful, angry fists and chairs chucked in fits of rage and secondly, it backed on to the police holding yard.

The yard, littered with smashed cars, was a veritable adventure land for kids - Nolan included - who often played there, hiding in the wrecks, sliding over the sticky vinyl seats and spinning steering wheels back and forth like big, grown-up drivers.

One day she looked out her bedroom window and her family's car, a blue Valiant with a sparkly top, had joined the mangled fleet.

A 'really weird' feeling washed over her before she set off across her back yard to join the kids playing in the Valiant where her 'crushed toys' lay on the floor, and the dried blood of her 30-year-old father was splattered everywhere.

How lucky was it then, that when her mother and father conceived her in that urgent tangle of arms and legs in the back of a Holden after his footy team won the grand final, that she scored the Irish genes - the ones that made you laugh and giggle at life, not the stiff and stern German ones that could have made the sight of blood a source of deep trauma for the rest of her life.

How lucky it was, also, that kaftans were in fashion and her 19-year-old mother could get married in one, the loose fall of the fabric flowing over her beautiful seven-months' pregnant belly. Two months later Carolyn Nolan returned home from hospital - baby Mandy in her arms - to find another woman had been wearing her nightie.

Six years later Mandy would become a grown-up on a little girl's body, the one who took control when the adults ceased functioning.

Ask nolan - who's sitting in a dark, quiet corner of The Urban cafe in Bangalow - what her father did for a living and she looks like she's attempting a jigsaw, but most of the pieces are missing.

"I don't know what my father was except that he was wild," smiles Nolan, a stunning, voluptuous woman with long blonde hair and eyes as vibrant as the lacy fuchsia pink bra struggling to control her ample bosom.

"He was incredibly good-looking, a great football player, he used to paint houses...He was an alcoholic. He'd grown up in a family where the father - didn't speak for 40 years. Then he was finally diagnosed with depression and he started talking again and by that stage my grandmother had had enough and said 'shut up! I don't want to hear you!"

"So my father was a product of that. His father had been an alcoholic who stopped drinking but he also stopped relating to the world. Dad was a gorgeous, funny, loving, human being. But he'd go off for three, four days at a time and you'd pick up the paper and he'd been arrested somewhere for doing something terrible."

"Mum was so young, this really fragile thing who lived in fear all the time because he was violent. He'd be drinking and she'd be freaking out, we'd be locked in the bathroom, all that sort of thing."

There are no tears in Nolan's eyes, there's no sad face, no tortured eyes. In fact we're laughing so loudly about something that is so not funny that the skinny lady with a pinched smoker's mouth eating eggs Benedict at the next table turns to scowl and eye-roll.

But Nolan's laughter had always drowned tragedy's guttural screams. Life was tough, but she and her mother laughed through it.

"It's a survival thing. I mean tragedy is only tragedy when the person sees it like that," she says, admitting that from a 39-year-old's vantage point her story seems so surreal 'it's almost like you're telling the story about someone else'.

One time Dad had been off on a drinking binge...He had a gun and mum hated having it in the house...so she hid it. He comes back after three or four days and when people drink like that they go into a flying rage and they'll go 'there's only one way out of this Carol! I've got to shoot my way out!"

"Next thing it's nine o'clock, the car turns up, he's in the house, it's about to be one of those situations where the guy's got the wife and the baby in the house and he gets the gun, but Mum had hidden the gun so the police charged in and shot him in the butt with a tranquilliser and took him off.

"Yes. These are some of my happy family memories. After that incident we had this thing in the family that you couldn't leave the house on a nasty note. But then one day Mum said 'if there is such a thing as a God, how can he let someone like you live!' and he didn't. That's the last thing she ever said to him and that poor woman had to live with the guilt of saying that."

Nolan remembers the police pulling up at the front gate with the news he had been killed in a head-on collision.

My mother...sees them and she just knows and starts screaming. It was that noise people make in grief," she says.

"And I remember as a child, just moving through it and nobody's telling me anything but kind of understanding it. I just used to think as a kid it would stop, it couldn't go on. I had incredible self-esteem. I thought 'no, I'm too important for this to keep going. This is mind-blowing, this can't be my life, this can't stick'. I had this inner monologue going."

"I loved my father but I had this knowing, this incredible inevitability that this day would come and I just grabbed Mum's hand and all I said was 'don't worry Mum, now we'll have some peace'."

And that's what strikes you about Nolan. She seems at peace, comfortable in her own skin, somehow hilariously aghast at the tragic chaos life dished up for her, but totally accepting of it. It was 'a perfect childhood' for a would-be comedian because it helped her form an understanding of humanity and vulnerability.

"Behind that surface that you see is a multiplicity of stories - the experience and the struggle and the anxiety and the challenges people have are quite extraordinary. So I had this incredible sense, from a young age, of the back story, not just the front story."

After her father died, and the and the pathetic pattern of alcoholism disappeared from her life, the theme of her 'back story' changed. As she gently held her screaming mother's hand she was thinking 'right, I've got a completely demolished mother with a six-month-old baby (her brother, Cameron); this is my time now. I take control'.

She made the breakfast, tidied, hung the washing on the line, scared off all 'the loooooozer men' who tried to woo her single hairdresser mother, who, when she was not self-educating with psychology books, was locked in a room meditating.

"We weren't allowed in because Mum was having 'quiet time' so I'd be at the door saying 'Cameron's torn his leg off, do you think you can come out of 'quiet time' now?" laughs Nolan.

But just as Nolan began feeling they were slowly moving forward, edging out of the blur of death and grief and all its attendant upheaval, the stench of BO seeping under their front door preceeded a very loud knockety, knock, knock, knock.

"This evangelistic-type branch of the Catholic Church turned up and...I remember thinking 'oh, no' because we were almost out, but from age six to eight I had to go to meetings with these freakish...completely out-of-control adults talking in tongues, playing bad acoustic guitar, trying to heal a guy with a leg cast up to his thigh. I remember thinking, 'how can I trust these people?"

"When they started to interfere with where Mum should start putting her money she pulled away and that's not easy."

As these dramas were being played out, nobody had really noticed that the little girl bravely wading through that hideous adult world was actually extremely intelligent.

Schooled in Murgon and Kingaroy, she was good at sport, a brilliant artist, and achieved high marks across the board. Nolan possessed a good sense of humour too, feeling for the first time the surge of power that comes from making someone laugh when she was about four years old.

"I went into Mum and Dad's room to rehearse my (kindergarten graduation) routine and when I finished they both said 'now you have to bow'. And I said 'bow?' and they said 'yeah, after you finish you have to bow' so I said 'bow wow' and they fell off the bed laughing...You realise the power of connecting even though I didn't get the joke and they were wetting themselves."

Her sense of humour was based on making fun of herself, not others, and as a teenager she used it to boost her popularity and to ward off any perception that being smart also meant she was a nerd.

Money was tight in her single-income family but she always felt nurtured and supported by her community. Growing up, she'd hear townspeople say things like 'be nice to Mandy Nolan, poor kid, her father's an alcoholic'; when she made it into the under-15 Queensland basketball team they held lamington drives to pay her airfare to Perth.

"I remember this hideous woman on that trip and she said 'OK we're going on an outing to see (the movie) Flashdance, and I said 'do you mind if I don't go, I'd rather stay and read," recalls Nolan.

"She said 'oh so you're too good for Flashdance are we?' She was getting stuck into me. 'You think you're so different don't you' - cause I always dressed really differently, did my own thing - 'look at the way you dress, there's something wrong with you, something really strange about you Mandy Nolan, everyone else wants to go to Flashdance but no, no, you don't want to go'.

"She made me feel like a freak, but I don't think you're a freak just because you don't want to see Flashdance are you?"

The Flashdance lady would figure nightmarishly in Nolan's so-called 'back story' along with the creepy high school teacher with the 'pilgrim beard' who pulled the talented art prize winner aside after class one day to tell her he was madly in love with her.

He showed me all this poetry he'd been writing for me and then he started to cry. It was really weird," laughs Nolan, madly rifling through her handbag to find what first looks like a Turkish Delight bar. It has the same pink and gold wrapper but it is in fact a high protein diet bar - she wants to lose 20kg this year - with the word 'success' written on it in shiny, curly, lower-case letters.

"I saw this 'success' bar and thought, 'I have to go on that'...how can that NOT work," exclaims Nolan, who almost breaks her teeth trying to bite into it and then two minutes later is forced to run, coughing and choking to the front of The Urban for a glass of water after a piece of 'success' gets stuck in her throat.

"God, you can't rush success can you," she jokes upon her return, slumping into her chair, exhausted from all the spluttering.

But Nolan had never actively sought success either. In fact, she had no sense of direction and after landing at the University of Queensland to begin her bachelor of arts degree, found herself lost 'in such a different world'.

She started modelling part-time and remembers her agency video-taping one fashion parade so the models' performances could later be dissected like a football team would a game.

"You're looking lovely at the front," the agency head had cooed as the statuesque blonde sashayed down the catwalk 'but when you turn, see your bum Mandy? See your bum? See it?."

Suddenly she realised a very large group of people were just standing there 'watching my bum wobble on a video'.

From fashion, she fell into full-on feminism living with a group of five girls hell-bent on looking ugly.

"Mum did freak out a bit because she'd sent this beautiful kind of slim, blonde girl off to Brisbane and I came home six months later and I'd shaved my head, put on about two stone, had the T-shirt , no bra, just hangin' out. I'd gone full militant," muses Nolan.

"We were like yobbo boys. We partied, drank, took heaps of drugs, passed out, went to rallies and had this competition called 'tit- butting' where you'd jump up and down on the bed with your hands behind your back and you had to use your breasts to knock the other woman off the bed."

Nolan, a pseudo lesbian - "we looked like lesbians, but none of us were' - would later begin performing in a theatre group called The Ugly Sisters 'and we weren't even ugly'.

Sometimes she would be picked out as the particularly funny one of the group and asked to perform solo, but she never considered stand-up as a career and anyway, she was blitzing her English literature and drama subjects.

Before completing her undergraduate degree, she was asked to tutor first-year drama and conduct drama workshops with maximum security prisoners at Boggo Road jail.

"I started feeling that this was my area, but...I didn't want to do straight acting so I did stand-up because nothing else was happening," says Nolan who took to the stage in Canberra after moving there with her boyfriend.

The 1980's was an intimidating time to be doing stand-up. The gigs could be rough and raucous - she remembers a fellow performer passing out after being hit on the head by a beer bottle - and the 21-year-old was struggling to find her voice and format.

She managed to score the job of support act for Whoopi Goldberg, but it was 'a dud gig' because with the rules stipulating she could neither speak nor go on stage, she was reduced to roving the foyer of a three-level auditorium dressed as a mute old lady eating cake.

She and her boyfriend moved to Byron Bay in the early '90s and while he had a nervous breakdown, she worked three jobs.

"I left him about five times...I'd leave, come back, leave, come back and the last time I left and came back I stayed one hour before I decided to leave again. I had this suitcase with wheels on it and I just wheeled it down the road and knocked on the door of this house and said 'can I live in your garage?' and they said 'yes'.

"The relationship ended and I remember returning to Byron from Sydney on a bus and I cried the whole way, just cried and cried and cried and no one would sit next to me. I got off, sobbing relentlessly about everything that had happened, about every small hurt. I walked up to Main Beach and there was a kite flying festival so the whole sky was full of kites and it was beautiful...I had a profound sense that I'd come home, a sense that there was a story for me here because I was really lost."

Nolan would later fall pregnant after an on-again off-again fling with a man she 'was quite in love with in a strange way', but he was struggling with drug addiction and the story that once belonged to her mother suddenly became hers.

"There I was in my mother's shoes...but my father had died and my mother had been released from the story through circumstance, and I thought 'oh, my God, I've got to get out of this again - actually get myself out'," she says.

"It was an incredible sense of that circle, but Mum never had to make that decision to get out and it is so difficult. It's like you have a love and compassion for the person but their behaviour is intolerable. We broke up and then a week later I found out that I was pregnant again. I made the decision to have the baby on my own. Just proceed. I'd left him but I'd still hadn't changed my thinking. I was still in the pattern of the relationship, the roles that we played."

"I was still performing, getting better, but my story at home was quite horrific. Then one day I woke up - I was four months pregnant - and this incredible thing came into my mind: it stops now, it stops here, it stops. This is not the story I want to give my children."

Nolan saw a therapist every week religiously for 18 months, at first experiencing the feeling of a huge unravelling and then finally a breakthrough that enabled her to understand herself.

"Once you instigate real change in yourself it's almost like things start to change, but until you change all your patterns you can expect the same shit forever...You have to work out what you really want in life, what makes you happy," she says.

"I came back to that person, that essence of myself that I hadn't seen since I was 13 or 14, that girl that you are before all that crap happens. It was really that return to a sense of belief in yourself, that every day normal girl that you are before you try to contrive.

"That's when my paintings got really good. As a comic, that was the moment when I took a huge leap. I became a comedian."

"So there I was at 31, deeply in debt, a single mother of two girls (Zoe, 11 and Sophia, 8) and overweight and I thought 'shit, that wipes out any chance of ever having a relationship'. But you know I didn't care. I didn't feel I needed anything. I was proud of myself, that I'd done it and then, well, I met my husband."

The TV director and filmmaker, who she'd known for years, was writing a script in Byron Bay and would drop in to see her.

"He was so beautiful...and it became more intense. As for sex, well, he wouldn't give over. He'd say 'look I've had so much TV industry sex, I don't want to have sex with anyone else until I'm in love with them'."

And that's what happened. They fell in love, had a child (Charlie, six) together and got married about two years ago.

"I'm finally focused on what I want, those values of having a happy family, I have a very positive belief. I always had a feeling that things would work out eventually - you just have to hold your breath sometimes."

Nolan has to leave The Urban in a hurry. Suddenly she is gone, and the laughter in that dark corner of the cafe finally dies away.

Down in one of Bangalow's trendy shops, an elegant dark-skinned woman, her crystal clear eyes hinting at healthy living and a portable fan blasting at her back to relieve her hot flushes, wraps a hand-painted oil lamp in bubble wrap.

"How did your interview go with Mandy?" she asks. "She's so nice, isn't she. Such a happy, easy-going family person."

Out on the street laughter competes with tears as you wonder why she had to struggle, to suffer so much in order to be described in such simple, normal terms.

Being childish - It's funny! - The Northern Rivers Echo - Thursday, 25th January 2007

Mandy Nolan has been tutoring children in the wicked art of stand-up comedy.

Even her daughter Sophie has been doing the course – so she can do jokes about her mum. As revenge.

The kids will do their five minute routines as part of The Big Joke Comedy Festival in Bangalow next month.

The Big Joke Comedy Festival, running in Bangalow from February 9-11, is pioneering a unique event – kid’s stand-up comedy. Inspired, created and performed by kids.Mandy Nolan (the festival director for the Big Joke) brings her years of experience as a comedian and teacher of comedy to mentor these joking juveniles (9-14) in a workshop she calls Funny Kids.

“Funny Kids is a show that really shows the intelligence of our children,” said Mandy. “Stand-up comedy allows the kids to delve into their inner selves and express the kind of issues that perplex them – like bullies, not being allowed to shop at Supre by their hippy mum, insufficient pocket money and the feelings of hopelessness and anger at the prospect of being handed a planet on the brink of extinction.”

The children are working through a series of workshops where Mandy reckons they find their “authentic voice”.

“I’m not looking for knock-knock jokes. I’m looking for what makes a kid tick. What’s their relationship like with their parents? Where do they fit in with their family? What are their daily struggles? What are their dreams for the future? Their fears?” said Mandy.

Performing validates their point of view and reminds the other kids in the audience that they are not alone – that there are other kids experiencing difficulties and challenges as well. Stand-up comedy helps kids develop vital skills like confidence, perspective and resilience.After their workshops, the kids will perform for the very first time at The Big Joke Comedy Festival!

Stand Up Comedy Fools - March 27th 2007 - Byron Shire Echo

Year after year, term after term I coach a brand new crew of aspiring locals in the gentle art of standup comedy. Most openly admit that it's their greatest fear, some confess a secret desire to become a professional, others are recoving from emotional trauma and want to rediscover their funny bone, and nearly every one of them are curious about just what will happen 6 weeks down the track when they take to the stage and perform their very first solo standup routine.

The process is remarkable, in 10 years of teaching you never cease to be surprised by just how extraordinary ordinary people are. The main objective is to uncover the persona - it's the person you become on stage and in a sense it becomes the frame of reference for your material.

The persona is based on your deep seated feelings about life, your cultural background, your gender, age, size etc. There is no perfect comic persona, the only secret is that the more in touch with who it is you are, warts and all, the more successful you tend to be on stage. An audience trusts someone who acknowledges their failings and struggles and is eager to laugh at the shared experiences.

This 6 week adult education course is something akin to therapy. I get you cartharte-ing about every shitty thing in your life, from your parents, to your lack of self-esteem, to your failed relationships to your big bum, the only difference to therapy is that it's a hell of a lot cheaper and you learn how to 'step out' of your experience and use it for good rather than evil!

You learn to step out of the up close indulgent me-focussed approach to personal experiences, to finding points of commonality that you can share with a large group. Ironically, it teaches you to be way less self focused!

You're not the only one who felt unloved by their mummy, or was rejected by their partner! Or, on second thoughts, maybe you were. The latest crop of comics have been through the emotional turmoil. They have shared their secrets, admitted their fears, laughed at their struggles and transformed all this into a succinct, funny and fabulous 5 minute routine.

Come and experience the miraculous transformation of ordanary people into extraordinary comics!