'It is so fundamental': Alice Fraser on comedy in the time of coronavirus

Alice Fraser was raised a Buddhist. Her father, Michael, is a “Jewish Buddhist” and her late mother, Lucy, found meditation helpful during the 33 years she lived with multiple sclerosis.

Fraser, a former corporate lawyer and student of English at Cambridge, is now a comedian, writer, podcaster and speaker. She doesn’t quite answer the question when asked whether she remains a Buddhist. “I meditate,” she says, with her half-sweet, half-knowing smile. But her approach to the coronavirus pandemic – which upended her plans and those of every creative artist in the country – is very much in the moment.

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“I feel like I got some weird Holocaust survivor genetics that have made me feel very pragmatic about it,” she says. “It’s so awful, it’s so daunting, but there’s things you can and there’s things you can’t do. I’m doing the things that I can do in order to not be eaten by the things I can’t do.”

First, what Fraser can’t do. She is sitting in workout gear on a comfy couch in a short-term Sydney rental. She shares it with her father who was living and working at a meditation centre before isolating with his daughter.

Fraser is supposed to be in London, where she lives most of the time now, preparing a show for the Edinburgh fringe festival in August. The festival was cancelled and is now struggling to survive.

She arrived in Australia in March for the comedy festival circuit with a new show about time, Chronos. A few days before the Melbourne festival was due to begin, it too was cancelled, just one of the many cultural institutions to fall victim to the ban on crowds. She is still paying rent in London but has no idea when she’ll be able to return.

That’s the way it is, says Fraser, who is in her 30s. “That [approach] is probably from my upbringing. Also, because my mum was sick when I was growing up the whole time, you just get very used to that ‘Oh god, we’re all gonna die’,” she says.

“You need to do the things you can do to help people you can help and really, when you hit that limit, be able to step away and not chew over it 1,000 times a night.”

Her mother died in 2015, and Fraser’s best-known show, Savage, revolves around her thoughts about life in the context of her mother’s illness: everything from the weirdness of “happy funerals” to the absurdity of anal bleaching. It is very much Fraser’s style – funny, thoughtful, sometimes melancholy, with the jokes serving to release the tension. It is now showing on Amazon Prime.

Everything seemed to screech to a halt, but there were things Fraser could do. Fellow comedian Sami Shah says: “If anyone [has] figured out how to use this opportunity to create new audiences and connect in a meaningful way, it’s Alice.”

In March, she began a nightly live Instagram show, Whatever This Is. She tries out bits from her festival gig: “It turns out straight standup doesn’t work very well without feedback.” She chats with friends, comedians, podcasters, all kinds of people. Sometimes it’s laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes wry, sometimes more serious.

In January, she agreed to host a daily 15-minute podcast, The Last Post, a satirical look at the news – the Guardian described it as “like a sweary, sped-up News Quiz”. And she also produces the Tea With Alice podcast.

“I’ve always been a big believer in creative constraints, and that creativity flourishes when your options are limited,” she says.

She knows she’s ridiculously busy and she feels ridiculously lucky.

“I get paid every day when most of my friends sat down with their agents three months ago and went ‘the next six months is cancelled. You have nothing’,” she says. “So many of my friends are now driving for supermarkets or Uber driving or delivering food.”

She is bemused by the reluctance of the federal government to support the creative arts during the pandemic, which has decimated an industry employing almost 200,000 people.

The government has resisted calls to expand the eligibility for the $1,500-a-fortnight jobkeeper program, which excludes many in the arts and entertainment industry because they often work as freelancers or casuals on short-term contracts. It has flagged that it will look at future support for the sector, and state governments have various programs of assistance.

“One of the biggest illusions about the arts is that entertainment is a luxury, that it is the last on, first off in a hierarchy of needs,” says Fraser. “It’s absolutely not true. When my grandmother was in world war two and she was hiding in a basement with five of her friends, they did shadow puppet plays on the walls. The first thing a baby does is play. It is so fundamental.

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“I genuinely cannot wrap my head around why the government is not giving it the support that it is giving other industries.”

For now, Fraser lives day by day. As Australia reopens, she is wondering about live gigs again, but worries about “the moral responsibility” of a performer potentially putting audience members at risk of contracting the virus. She’s heading out carefully, going for walks, reading the comfort novels of Dorothy L Sayers and Georgette Heyer, and working hard.

Fraser has made the most of lockdown, but live work is “incomparable”. It’s about the level of engagement with an audience, the ability to test an idea. “It gives you a bone-deep sense of the minute, the constant shifts in the rhythm of society.”

Postcards from the pandemic looks at how everyday Australians are coping with immense changes coronavirus has brought to their lives. We’d like to hear your story about how you are managing during this crisis. Email: postcards@theguardian.com