live wire

Whether on radio, TV or the comedy circuit, Jo Stanley sparks up when an audience reacts to her comedic brand of storytelling

WORDS KYLIE MILLER

For someone who has made a career out of discussing her personal life for laughs during 15 hours a week of live breakfast radio, Jo Stanley, perhaps surprisingly, says she is a private and introverted soul.

So introverted, in fact, that at the age of six she was ordered to repeat kindergarten so she could better develop her social skills.

“If people saw the private me they’d be astounded at how introverted I am,” she smiles over a white wine in a Melbourne café. “When my guard’s down and I’m sitting in my own space, that’s probably when I’m most happy.”

As a key member of Fox FM’s Matt and Jo Show – four co-hosts actually share the studio – Stanley’s energetic persona has dominated Melbourne’s breakfast radio slot since late 2003.

She has a growing string of TV credits including The Panel talk show, the high-rating improvisational comedy series Thank God You’re Here and, one of her most challenging to date, last year’s singing sensation It Takes Two. Though she questions whether she would again participate in a show that involved such public criticism, 2.2 million viewers watched her place second in the grand final.

Since Stanley’s first television appearance singing in a commercial for the Australian Christian Television

Association – her parents were Christian missionaries – she has been driven to perform. But mostly she loves to tell stories.

“My grandmother was an extraordinary storyteller,” she recalls. “She was a huge influence and had a real sense of humour that inspired me. She didn’t have the easiest life, but she always found things to laugh at.”

Now aged 35, Stanley is preparing for a challenging new role – Jo Stanley – Prettier in Person at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (21 March to 11 April), which takes her singing further by including songs she has written herself.

After six weeks “locked away in silence” writing and rewriting the script, Stanley is now rehearsing the show with a director.

No newcomer to the comedy circuit – she performed stand-up for years and has appeared in nearly a dozen shows at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival since her debut at 19 – she still feels intense pressure to get it right.

This year she is mining a topic she knows well, both as an avid consumer and, more recently, as a subject.

Matt Tiley and Jo
Stanley, stars of Fox
FM, perform in Priscilla
Queen Of The Desert
The Musical
Photo: WireImage/
Serge Thomann“The chick mags that we love to hate and hate to love! We spend a lot of time reading them and criticising them, but we’re all addicted to them as well.”

Her show references familiar magazine components: sealed sections, star signs and relationship advice. It also includes personal stories, including her experience of moving from a reader to the subject of glossy spreads.

She also speaks about appearing in swimwear for lads’ magazine FHM – a fundraising stunt encouraged by her radio co-host Matt Tiley – and another where she opened her home to OK magazine.

“For OK it was about assessing my life and going ‘this isn’t really that impressive in the pages of a magazine’. You see these celebrities with these gorgeous houses with amazing interior design and beautifully behaved pets and I looked at my life and went, ‘Oh, that won’t do’. It was quite confronting. I suppose your own expectations of yourself are greater than other people’s.”

Perception is important to Stanley, who arrives immaculately groomed and fashionably dressed in a black mini-dress and high, wooden platform heels. She thinks carefully before listing reading among her favourite pastimes – she is currently fascinated by Indian authors – fearing she might come across as “too boring”.

“What I do on air and on stage is me, and I’m certainly not dishonest, but it’s a heightened version of me,” she says.

“I am extremely social in that I love hanging out with friends and having a good laugh and partying, and that brings out the loud extroverted side of me, but I do find that extremely exhausting. I need at least a couple of hours every day at home by myself in absolute silence to rejuvenate, and I’m at my most comfortable in that environment.”

She is seriously pursuing the singing training she began for It Takes Two and has projects in the pipeline she hopes will bear fruit – nothing she can yet reveal – but for now she is foregoing her beloved afternoon naps to prepare for her return to the stage.

“You really have to get out there and work up the material in front of a live audience. So it’s a lot of doing gigs in pubs and bars and facing your fears … It’s a big process and it’s terrifying in a lot of ways, but really exciting too. You grow so quickly when you throw yourself out there like that!”

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TOP PICKS

Jo Stanley’s top five picks for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival

• Phil Nichol – Hiro Worship
• Frank Woodley – Possessed
• Ross Noble
• Fiona O’Loughlin
• Celia Pacquola – Hating Alison Bice
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