A woman wearing Victorian clothing and a gold-painted mannequin’s leg on her left arm steps out from behind a curtain. There’s a microphone taped to the sole of the plastic limb’s foot and when she reaches the front row of the audience she points it at a young man. “Probl-eem?” she asks in a soupy eastern European accent.

“I sometimes feel unworthy of love,” he says, drawing sympathetic murmurs from the audience. “Why do you feel unworthy of love?” asks Julia Masli, the woman dressed as a kind of psychedelic Florence Nightingale. “You are worthy of love.”

Welcome to ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, the award-winning show Masli will perform at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival next month. Its premise is simple: the 28-year-old Estonian-born performer plays a kind of oddball agony aunt who moves among her audience asking them to bare their souls. In response, she offers sympathy and a range of unusual “solutions” ranging from gifts (a pot plant, someone else’s sock) to activities (mending a broken chair with gaffer tape) carried out on stage.

On the night I saw the show, she got the young man in the front row to crowd-surf up the steeply raked seats of London’s Soho Theatre. As he passed over my head, arms outstretched, clothes in disarray, his laughter filled the auditorium.

We meet the following day in the theatre’s bar. Masli is wearing a cardigan, black jeans and boots, her hair in a side plait. Even though her picture is plastered on the theatre’s windows, no one recognises the ringmaster of last night’s surreally riotous show.

I ask her about the risks she takes asking people to unburden themselves in what is ostensibly a comedy performance. The previous night, for example, a young woman revealed her immune system was badly compromised. Masli listened intently and introduced her to a doctor who was in the audience. There was a brief discussion of antibodies and bone marrow before the absurdity of the situation drew laughter from everyone involved.

“Oh totally, it can be difficult,” she says. “The question I ask of the audience is open and they are welcome to share whatever they like. When something very real comes up, it can be very hard. Of course, I can’t even try to fix these things. I just have to be present and be with that person for a bit.”

She winces when asked to name the most difficult “problem” she has encountered since her show became a word-of-mouth sensation at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2023.

“There was one that really threw me. A guy told me his family had been killed in the West Bank. I felt totally useless and I thought perhaps I should stop doing the show. But people are welcome to say whatever’s on their mind and he felt he needed to say that.”

If the name Julia Masli is unfamiliar, that’s hardly surprising. This graduate of Ecole Philippe Gaulier – the Parisian “clown school” whose alumni include Sacha Baron Cohen – is a relative newcomer despite the five-star reviews and awards ha ha ha ha ha ha ha has attracted. Not so long ago, she lugged her props to pubs and open mic nights on public transport. Now she has management and a producer; her show travels to New York after it finishes in Melbourne, and she has had preliminary discussions about a television series.

A flash of anxiety crosses her face when you mention how quickly her star has risen. “It’s still difficult when the show is selling out,” she insists. “There’s pressure. Before you had the freedom to do whatever you wanted. Now there’s a lot more people looking.”

My costume was just soaked in sweat every day. I think it’s gone mouldy now.

Masli was born in Tallinn, Estonia’s capital. Her parents are both lawyers. When she was 12, the instability of post-Soviet Estonia prompted them to send their daughter to a boarding school in the English seaside town of Brighton. Masli spoke very little English and learned to communicate by miming.

As a teenager, she dreamed of being an actor and performing Shakespearian tragedies. But her applications to a string of British drama schools were turned down when tutors heard her Baltic accent. Even now, despite her success as a clown and comedian, she has a lingering desire to tread the boards as Ophelia or Desdemona.

A workshop run by Complicite, a pioneering British theatre company heavily influenced by the French mime tradition, set her on the path to clowning. “A whole world opened up. The workshop was terrifying, but also amazing. I got really curious and wanted to be like them. And they told me about this clown school in Paris...”

Ecole Philippe Gaulier is where she met her partner, a Norwegian student called Viggo Venn. They live together in north London. Venn’s profile also soared last year when he won Britain’s Got Talent with a series of wonderfully daft clown routines that prompted host Simon Cowell to describe him as “the most stupid act we’ve had this year”.

“It’s nice because Viggo and I used to be like that,” she says, crossing her fingers. “Now we’ve both found our own thing and it feels much better for us.”

Masli’s breakthrough occurred on a far smaller stage – a subterranean 100-seat venue called The Monkey Barrel. She had taken ha ha ha ha ha ha ha to Edinburgh as a work-in-progress, but even the show’s 1.30am timeslot didn’t discourage the crowds, or the big-name comedians who started to turn up each night. “It got so sweaty, people came out drenched,” she says, laughing. “My costume was just soaked in sweat every day. I think it’s gone mouldy now.”

Before ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, her work was known mostly by the cognoscenti. Her first solo show was Choosh!, the story of an eastern European who migrates to America in search of a hot dog. Legs is her celebration of her favourite limb. “What’s inside your trousers?” she asks her audience, wearing an expression of wide-eyed delight. “Legs!” they yell back.

The challenging concept underpinning ha ha ha ha ha ha ha was partly inspired by a period when she struggled with her mental health. In 2018, at a clown workshop in Norway, she found herself feeling overwhelmed and unable to perform. “I was depressed for quite a while; it was really hard for me to get out of that,” she says. “Eventually, I did Legs again after months of not performing. The show was something that saved me.”

It’s the reason she wears a gold-painted leg in her current show, she says. The plastic legs – she gets them from a mannequin company in Estonia and paints them herself – have become a totem, a kind of “safety blanket”.

Masli has said she considers ha ha ha ha ha ha ha to be a serious show and can’t understand why people think it’s comedy. I’d assumed she was being disingenuous for the sake of publicity, but the truth is a little more complicated. “It is serious in a way because I’m not going out there trying to be funny,” she explains. “That wouldn’t work. I like laughter. I love hearing it and it helps me know I’m on the right track. But the laughter comes at surprising moments and I’m not in control of it at all.”

How does she know when she’s had a particularly successful show? She smiles. “A good one is when someone messages me and says ‘I went on a date with the guy you introduced me to during the show’. Or, ‘we’re having a drink in the bar’. I think ah-ha! That’s what it’s all about.”

Loading

Julia Masli’s ha ha ha ha ha ha ha is at the Chinese Museum, April 9-21. Viggo Venn is at Trades Hall, April 8-21, except Wednesdays. Both are part of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, comedyfestival.com.au. The Age is a festival partner.