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The profile · researched 9 October 2026
Anthony Locascio: the insolvency clerk who turned a cancelled wedding into an hour about Dante
A self-managed Sydney stand-up with Greek and Italian grandparents, Locascio has written seven hours of material since 2017 and spent much of 2026 touring The Divine Comedy — a show built from a broken engagement and ten days of silence — which reached North America for the first time this October.
Out of the insolvency files
Locascio arrived at stand-up by way of corporate insolvency, where he spent around five years unwinding failed companies before leaving that work in 2017 to perform. He began doing open mics the same year and progressed quickly enough to reach the New South Wales state final of Raw Comedy twice, the national open-mic competition that has served as the usual front door to the Australian circuit.
What distinguished him early was a subject nobody else on the Sydney bills was mining with the same specificity: being a third-generation ethnic Australian with Greek and Italian grandparents, in a country where that experience had mostly been handled either as broad caricature or not at all. He has remained self-managed throughout, writing, funding and promoting his own hours rather than attaching himself to a management stable — a choice that shows in how directly his tours are routed at diaspora audiences as much as at comedy-club regulars.
By 2021 and 2022 he was being hand-picked for the gala showcases at both the Sydney and Perth comedy festivals, the ten-minute sets that function as an industry shop window in Australia. He has since built out sold-out seasons at Sydney Comedy Festival, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Adelaide Fringe, Perth Comedy Festival and Brisbane Comedy Festival.
Four hours, each one a different argument
The run of titled shows begins with Don't Call Me a Wog! in 2022, a direct engagement with the slur and with the audience's assumptions about who was going to tell which jokes. Heart of Darkness followed in 2023. Alongside them sits Confirmation, his debut special, recorded in 2020 and picked up for worldwide distribution by Comedy Dynamics, which put it on Amazon Prime and Apple TV — a significant piece of reach for a comic who was then three years into performing.
Across the same period he has worked the broadcast circuit at home rather than through it: appearances on Triple J's Hack, SBS Sport, beIN Sports, Channel 9's Today Extra and Sunrise, and Channel 7. He also hosts and performs at community events the comedy industry tends to ignore, including the Greek Festival of Sydney, the Italian National Ball, and both the Greek Australian and Italian Australian comedy galas in 2025.
Since 2017 he has written and performed seven separate hours of stand-up, which is a heavy rate of production for a self-funded act and partly explains the tonal distance between the earliest material and what he is doing now.
Pappou, and the Enmore
The show that moved him from promising to properly established was Pappou, which ran through 2024 and into 2025. Its subject is his grandfather Petros, who arrived in Australia as one of Greece's most promising young goalkeepers and was then banned for life after punching a referee. The football story is the hook; the show is about migration, inherited emotion and what it costs to bond with a man formed by an entirely different world.
Pappou toured to Australia, London, New York, Toronto and New Zealand, and was filmed at a sold-out Enmore Theatre in Sydney in January 2025 — a 1,600-capacity room, and a jump in scale from the club seasons that preceded it. Rather than shop the recording to a streamer, Locascio wrote, funded and produced it himself and released the full hour free on YouTube on 1 May 2025.
A review of the Melbourne season by RMITV singled out the third-generation perspective as genuinely unfamiliar on a comedy bill, and praised the vulnerability with which he described loving a grandfather he struggled to reach, without the introspection breaking the comic rhythm. The same reviewer noted he handled material on gender identity and homophobia without turning preachy, and that the edgier moments risked losing the more traditionally minded part of a crowd that had come largely on ethnic solidarity.
Ten days of silence, and a title borrowed from Dante
The Divine Comedy, written for 2026, came out of his engagement ending: his fiancée called off the wedding weeks before the ceremony. His response was to sit a ten-day Vipassana retreat at Blackheath in the Blue Mountains — total silence until the final day, no technology, vegetarian meals, early starts and near-constant meditation — and the retreat became the spine of the hour.
The title is not a joke about ambition. Locascio is using comedy in Dante's medieval sense, a narrative that travels from sorrow towards happiness rather than one measured in laughs per minute, and the show is structured accordingly: a conventional club-comedy first half on weddings, stag dos, religion and the stereotypes attached to his background, then a turn into the retreat and what it did to him.
Reviews have split along exactly that seam. David Kary gave the Sydney season at the Comedy Store in the Entertainment Quarter four stars on 15 May 2026, praising the audience banter and noting that Locascio keeps the actual decisions he reached on the retreat private. RMITV also gave it four stars, crediting the use of Greco-Roman symbolism and the zeibekiko without recourse to stereotype, while judging the jokes less consistently sharp than Pappou's and the opening run of edgy material poorly matched to the room. Writing for Chortle on 26 June 2026 after the London run at the Top Secret Comedy Club on Drury Lane, Steve Bennett gave three stars: he found the first section's married-misery and finger-snapping-gay-man tropes low-effort and the extended Last Supper sketch formulaic, but rated the stagecraft highly and thought the second half, where explaining the experience mattered more to Locascio than landing the next punchline, was where the hour justified itself.
Standing in October 2026
The Divine Comedy has already played Australia, London, Athens and Istanbul, and took Best Comedy at the Darwin Fringe Festival in 2026. That award is the clearest external marker he has for the show, and it arrived for an hour that several reviewers judged to be deliberately trading punchline density for narrative.
On 2 October 2026 he opened his first proper North American tour at Rodney's Comedy Club in New York, followed by Punch Line Philly on 3 October, Yardbird Comedy Club in Hoboken on 7 October, Comedy Bar Danforth in Toronto on 8 October and Théâtre Sainte-Catherine in Montreal on 9 October. The remaining leg runs through City Winery in Boston on 11 October, the Lincoln Lodge in Chicago on 15 October, Bellflower in California on 16 October, the Rabbit Box Theatre in Seattle on 17 October, Cobb's Comedy Club in San Francisco on 21 October and Salt Lake City on 23 October, closing in the Belly Room at the Comedy Store in West Hollywood on 24 October.
It is a club-sized route rather than a theatre one, which is the usual shape of a first American tour for an Australian act with no US television behind them — and a deliberate step down in room size from the Enmore. The open question for the next hour is whether the Dante structure was a one-off response to a specific year or the direction he intends to keep working in.
The show, now
The current show is The Divine Comedy, roughly 70 minutes of stand-up with support acts on most nights, recommended for ages 15 and over — though the Sydney season was reviewed as running closer to an hour. It is a one-man show with no set to speak of, and it moves in two clear movements: an opening stretch of crowd work and provocative club material on weddings, stag dos, religion and ethnic stereotype, including an extended Last Supper sketch, then a mid-show turn into the ten-day silent Vipassana retreat he sat after his engagement collapsed. The finish is cultural rather than comic, built around Greek music and the zeibekiko dance, which David Kary in the Sydney Arts Guide called a rousing way to end. Reviewers agree on the stagecraft and the audience handling; they divide on the first half, with Chortle's Steve Bennett rating the early tropes low-effort while judging the introspective second half the stronger work. Audiences expecting a straightforward 'wog comedian' hour have been the most likely to feel short-changed — the show is explicitly built as a journey from sorrow to resolution rather than a joke-per-line set.
Researched from anthonylocascio.me · anthonylocascio.me · anthonylocascio.me · chortle.co.uk · sydneyartsguide.com.au · rmitv.org · rmitv.org · getgreece.com
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