BE PART OF SOMETHING NEW
No followers. No likes. No formula.
Just the beginning.
FRESH. BUILT FROM ZERO.
The World Has Gone Mad PERFORMERS WANTED
If you can make a room laugh, we want you on our stage.
STAND-UP • IMPROV • PROPS
CHARACTER
• SKETCH
SPOKEN WORD • MUSICAL
Melbourne venues & comedy tours
SHOWS COMING SOON
YOUTUBE Shows Coming Soon
From Melbourne Nightlife to Comedy
Name’s Tate, by the way. Before I ever stepped behind a pair of decks, I was a fourteen-year-old kid working at Chevron Nightclub, obsessed with how rooms actually worked.
Back then half the jobs didn’t even exist. There was no manual — I learnt it all hands-on, through experience, by just making it work. Lighting, sound, stage management, crowd flow — watching how a room reacted in real time and figuring it out from there.
By the late ’80s and early ’90s I was running and co-promoting Route 66 at the Fun Factory in South Yarra. Later, when Metro’s underage night was struggling, I helped rebuild it from the ground up.
We poured years of hard-foot street promotion into that room. On our biggest nights, the overflow of kids stretched all the way up Bourke Street — police, council, local press, the lot. Absolute chaos. But it was proof of what happens when real promotion hits critical mass.
Built, not bought
Working almost every job inside a venue — lighting, sound, graphics, promotion, DJing, event management — changes how you see a crowd. You start noticing things other people miss:
A promoter feels a problem coming before it happens.
A lighting operator knows the second the energy dips.
A DJ reads the room turning before it turns.
A sound tech hears the clash before the crowd does.
When you’ve worn every hat, you stop seeing an event as separate jobs and start seeing it as one experience. Melbourne’s underground was living that idea long before anyone put a fancy corporate name on it.
I’ve never done this for the money, and I’ve never cared much for whoever’s famous this week. I’ve always been drawn to the kid standing quietly in the corner — the introvert who genuinely loves the culture instead of the spotlight. Those are the ones who end up shaping the next generation.
The pivot
Then the world changed. COVID gutted the traditional scene, and like a lot of freelancers, I ended up working outside entertainment — Liquorland, Coles Express, Reddy Express. Everything I’d learnt suddenly stopped mattering, and overnight I had to reinvent myself as Tate Strauss, Retail Team Member.
A few years passed. Every time I looked online I’d see mates running massive, large-scale events. Meanwhile my headspace was stuck — caught in the algorithms and news cycles, dealing with day-to-day retail chaos on the shop floor.
My wife put it straight: “Stop watching the news, stop doomscrolling, and use what you know to build something real instead.”
She was right. Nobody needed another platform telling them the world was ending. They needed a reason to laugh.
The vision for TWHGM
We’re surrounded by bad news every time we pick up a phone. TWHGM — The World Has Gone Mad — isn’t pretending those problems don’t exist. It’s just choosing to give people somewhere to laugh for a couple of hours.
It’s about putting a microphone in front of the naturally funny people you already know:
The tradie with perfect comedic timing. The servo worker who has the whole line laughing. The warehouse bloke with stories too wild to make up.
Life has a natural balance to it. There’ll always be serious moments, hard conversations, difficult times. But if we lose the other half — laughter, mateship, having fun — we’re completely out of balance. TWHGM is my way of putting a little of that balance back.
I’m not trying to recreate the old club scene. Every generation deserves its own version of belonging. In the ’80s and ’90s that happened on the dancefloor. Today, maybe it starts with a microphone, a room full of strangers, and a really good laugh.
If Melbourne helped build one of the world’s great club cultures, I reckon it can build one of the funniest live comedy communities too.
Get involved
Put up a poster at work, in your shopfront, or on your breakroom wall.
If you’re the person who keeps the job site or counter laughing, step up to the mic.
If you’re the person who keeps the job site or counter laughing, step up to the mic.
Jump in the group, get behind-the-scenes drops, and follow the rollout.