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“Then everyone is acknowledging their responsibilities,” she says. “Comedians can be taken off a list of members of the guild if this organisation does an investigation and finds they have broken the Code of conduct.”

There is precedent for setting up a professional Comedy guild to advocate on behalf of comedians and resolve issues: comedians in New Zealand established a guild in 1999. The guild sets recommended pay rates, mediates professional disputes, and has created a code of conduct for people working in the comedy industry that outlines unacceptable behaviour.

The federal government’s newly created Creative Workplaces body may also provide oversight to the comedy industry. The body, which is in the process of being established, is expected to set workplace standards and codes of conduct across art forms, with the threat of government funding being pulled from organisations that fail to meet them.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Creative Australia said that Creative Workplaces will “promote fair, safe, and respectful workplaces for Australian artists, arts workers, and arts organisations”.

Fraser is unsure if comedians would be willing to sign up for a code of conduct: “When there’s been discussions about things like having a code of conduct in venues, [around] avoiding hate speech, there’s been furious arguments about that because comedians don’t like being told what to do.”

Instead, she suggests a structure of mediation and accountability. “Everyone would say their piece, and you could have a kind of community restoration process.”

“In Australia, you could call almost every venue in a few days and get an undertaking from them that if you blacklisted somebody, they would not put that person up,” she says. “But if you’re going to deprive someone of work, there needs to be an appeals process, a public process where somebody has a chance to defend themselves.”

In the immediate term, there are problems that could be addressed by individual bookers and comedy rooms. Scout Boxall, a comedian who was nominated for Best Newcomer at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in 2021, also raises the point of getting to and from gigs safely.

It’s something that drew attention in 2018, when comedian Eurydice Dixon was killed on her way home from a gig in Melbourne.

Since 2019, MICF have organised and collected donations for Light the Way Home, an initiative that gives women, non-binary and other vulnerable performers free Uber rides during the festival, and to a limited extent throughout the year. In 2018, English comedian Angela Barnes established the UK equivalent, the Home Safe Collective, which runs during the Edinburgh Fringe.

“I don’t think, on an emotional level, men fully grasp the importance of stuff like Light the Way Home, of people car-pooling and offering each other lifts, of making sure people get home safe,” Boxall says.

Boxall’s suggestions for bookers, beyond helping acts to get home safe, is to find a venue that is as accessible as possible; pay comedians in food instead of drinks; and to circulate people’s pronouns ahead of time, which indicates that the space is safe for queer people.

“And if someone has a reputation, really think hard before booking them and think about who you’re also putting in that green room with them,” they say. “If you have to think super hard about putting someone on a line-up, you can just not put them on the line-up.”