The Australian Comedy Studies Collective was formally instituted in 2024, growing out of a series of informal gatherings and dicsussions that took place over several years at conferences, cafés, and comedy clubs.
We value inclusivity and aim to break down the institutional boundaries between academic disciplines — and those separating academia from industry — by bringing together performers, audiences, and researchers of comedy regardless of the institutional environment they operate in. While currently most of our members are based in Naarm/Melbourne, we hope to expand our membership to include those in other Australian cities, in regional and rural areas, and anyone interested in the study of Australian comedy around the world.
If you share an interest in critically investigating the social, cultural, and ideological dimensions of comedy, we invite you to join us by attending an event, becoming a member, or subscribing to our newsletter.

Mitch Alexander
Mitch Alexander is a PhD candidate, vocalist, metalhead, comedian, philosopher, commentator, podcaster, vegetarian, reductionist utilitarian who hates labels. He has a Masters in Philosophy from Monash University, over 20 million online streams with his band Eye Of The Enemy, was an amateur comedian for a decade, and his previous comedy/politics podcast Not Good Enough regularly charted in the Top 10 of Australian shows. He is currently researching the role digital platforms such as Instagram and YouTube are playing in Australian comedy. It is an interdisciplinary project incorporating platform studies, his previous work in philosophy, notions of persona and authenticity, and investigations into cultural and industrial disruptions taking place in the Australian comedy scene.

Suchi Chowdhury
Suchi is a PhD candidate at RMIT University, Melbourne, researching stand-up comedy in India. Her study focuses upon how politics and stand-up impact upon each other. She is creating data through interviews, ethnographic study, and textual analysis.
Born and raised in India, she moved to Melbourne eighteen years ago and has worked in TAFE and tertiary education. In her other life in India, she worked in advertising, journalism, and public relations.
She graduated from Monash University with a master’s degree in Communication & Media Studies in 2018. Earlier in India, she graduated with a master’s degree in Comparative Literature. She lives in suburban Melbourne with husband and two children.
Suchi’s recent work has been published in Open Library of Humanities (2024).

Bradley J. Dixon
Bradley J. Dixon is a writer, critic, and media scholar working on Wurundjeri country in Melbourne, Australia. His research focuses on developments in social and new media technologies and their effects on art, culture, and everyday life.
Bradley recently completed a PhD at RMIT University with a thesis titled “Performing the Self: Parafictional Persona and the Comedian Comedy,” which examines several historical and contemporary examples of comedians playing themselves across television, film, web series, and social media performance. Bradley also teaches into the Cinema Studies and Popular Culture streams of RMIT’s Media program, and in 2024 led an RMIT studio on the production of comedy media. He is not particularly funny.

Kyle Harvey
Dr Kyle Harvey is a Research Fellow in the School of Media, Film and Journalism, and works on the Australian Research Council-funded Linkage Project Comedy Country: Australian Performance Country as an Agent of Change. His research explores the lived experiences of migration, culture and social change in Australian media and performance, and is particularly focused on the intersecting processes of diasporas, mobility and performance in Australia, Asia, and the Middle East. Kyle’s research also encompasses media history, migration history, and the history of radicalism and social movements, oral history, intellectual history, memory, biography, and the history of education.
Kyle’s work has been published in Media International Australia (2020), History Australia (2017), Labour History (2016) and in edited collections such as The Oxford Handbook of Peace History (2022), Translating Worlds: Migration, Memory and Culture (2020) and Remembering Migration: Oral Histories and Heritage in Australia (2019).

Til Knowles
Til Knowles is a PhD student at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Her PhD research focuses on the impact of suicide jokes told by stand-up comedians in post-2000 Australia. Her PhD is associated with the ARC Linkage Project Comedy Country: Australian Performance Comedy as an Agent of Change. She’s interested in the role of authenticity, community, mediation and confession in contemporary performance comedy. Til holds a research Masters from the University of Melbourne entitled: “Larrikins, listeners and Lifeline: inside Australian comedy chatcast The Little Dum Dum Club”, which examined the performance of cultural conventions and community in comedy podcasts. Til is also a pop culture critic, speculative fiction nerd and occasional podcaster, hosting the Australasian Humour Studies Network podcast Serrated Edge.
Along with Bradley J. Dixon, Mitch Alexander, Jacob Sacher, Kyle Harvey and Suchi Chowdhury, Til is a co-founder of the Australian Comedy Studies Collective.

Jacob Sacher
Jacob Sacher is an award winning alternative comedian. He is a practioner researcher working in the field of alternative comedy, and Jewish comedy. His current research, as part of a Masters-by-Research looks at the role of the “loser” in Jewish comedy, across time and discipline, and investigates the fringe circuit more broadly. He is also the chairperson of the not-for-profit comedy theatre Cornershop Comedy.