Standing up to make people laugh in public is a serious matter, but two Canberra mums have taken on the task with considerable success and will be showing off their comic skills during the coming Canberra Comedy Festival.

Together they will perform a show called Before and After, which is all about life, love and menopause.

I caught up with Caitlin Maggs and Sarah Stewart at their favourite pub on the Kingston Foreshore for a chat about laughter. 

Both are wives and mothers. Stewart, proudly in her 60s, has kids in their 30s and Maggs, in her 30s, has a six-year-old, Sadie. 

There the similarity ends, for Maggs is also an electrician and successful boss-woman, while Stewart, who likes to think of herself as “a little bit crazy”, is a public servant in the nursing sector with a midwifery background.

Their respective professions make downtime TV-watching a problem, with Call The Midwife eliciting cries of “oh, no, you shouldn’t do that” from Stewart, and Maggs unable to stand watching The Block.

But midwifery and the trades have also provided a rich source of comic inspiration for the pair, who see themselves as perfectly complementary.

“I’m much older,” Stewart says, “so to me Caitlin, she’s beautiful, an inspiration to me.”

“I think that about you,” Maggs cuts in.

Stewart, a self-described “Pom and Kiwi”, moved to Australia from NZ 11 years ago, and has few problems with her new direction, except perhaps for placating her husband.

“But he’s up for it, considering how mean I am about him on stage,” she says.

Maggs, born and bred in Canberra and a long-time resident of Evatt even in her married life, always wanted to be a nurse.

“But then in year 12 I had a change of heart. There were electricians in the family, so I did a pre-apprenticeship in 2007 – not with dad – and qualified in 2012. It was exciting being able to work at last and earn money,” she says.

“I was often asked: ‘Are you doing it for attention?’ But now there are girls in every class, it’s awesome.” 

Bygone attitudes to hands-on studies at school, they agree, led to a lot of girls forced to do sewing and a lot of boys doing woodwork.

“I’d love to have done woodwork at school,” Stewart says.

“The apprenticeship was the hardest four years of my life,” Maggs says. “I had to deal with sexual harassment and ask myself: ‘Do I just suck it up?’ – such a strange choice to have to make.”

“I’ve always been a bit of a larrikin,” Maggs says, but she actually started doing open-mic comedy sessions in rural Victoria when her partner was working on wind farms around Ballarat, thinking, “no one is going to know.”

“I enjoyed it… I came back to Raw Comedy, won the heats here in Canberra and then did six shows in Melbourne in front of 1000 people – mum, dad, my daughter and hubby came, too.”

She’s too modest. She was the winner of the 2021 National Grand Final Raw Comedy competition. 

Stewart says: “I always wanted to be an actress, but no, I became a midwife.”

Then her daughter, sensing her mum’s innate comic skills, bought her an online comedy course during the covid period. 

“I was able to practice my comedy online, so I was very grateful,” she says.

Comedy is hard work, Maggs says. “Only 20 per cent of comedians are women.”

Neither has ever dried up on stage. Stewart even has a trick joke about dementia, which she keeps up her sleeve, and she never forgets that line.

The pair met while performing with a group of comedians in a show at Tumut two years ago and when Stewart decided to create a show for the 2024 Comedy Festival and needed to find someone she’d get on with, Maggs was free.

They work separately within the show, but their themes are similar – mothers and families, and their audiences are women. 

“We complement each other… Caitlin’s got a lot of fans and I’m hanging on her coat-tails,” Stewart says, but Maggs believes Stewart is the brains behind the act, saying: “She’s the driving force”. 

“I don’t have little kids,” Stewart says. “But Caitlin has this amazing network. It’s all about coming together.”

Before and After, The Street Theatre, March 16.