Josh Thomas

From Blackwater to Best Newcomer

Joshua Michael Thomas was born on 26 May 1987 in Blackwater, a mining town in central Queensland. He was 17 when he won the Melbourne International Comedy Festival's Raw Comedy competition in 2005, the open-entry contest that remains the main way an unknown Australian stand-up gets noticed. Two years later his first full solo show played the 2007 festival under the title Please Like Me and took the Melbourne Airport Award for Best Newcomer.

Television came quickly. From 2009 he sat as the Generation Y team captain on Network 10's panel quiz Talkin' 'Bout Your Generation, which made his halting, high-register delivery familiar to a national audience years before he had written a script of his own. His promoter's biography now describes a career that began with stand-up two decades ago and passed through several celebrity reality competitions along the way, which is a fair summary of the years before the show that changed his standing.

Please Like Me and the American years

The stand-up title became a series. Please Like Me, which Thomas created, co-wrote and starred in, premiered on the ABC's second channel ABC2 in 2013 and was picked up in the United States by Pivot. It ran for four series and became the reference point for everything he has done since: a comedy that dealt with serious subjects without losing its nerve. It was nominated for an International Emmy for Best Comedy Series in 2014, won AACTA and Australian Writers' Guild awards, and Thomas himself took the AACTA Award for Best Television Screenplay in 2015. A Logie followed in 2017, and the series collected GLAAD Media Award nominations in the United States. It is still the first thing his own website points visitors towards, streaming free on ABC iview in Australia and on YouTube everywhere else.

He then moved to the American system. Everything's Gonna Be Okay, which he created for Freeform, ran for two seasons from 2020 with Thomas as star and showrunner before the network cancelled it in 2021. That same year he made public an autism diagnosis; he had been diagnosed with ADHD at 28. Both diagnoses became material rather than a footnote, and they shaped the show with which he came back to the stage.

Let's Tidy Up: the return to stand-up

Thomas returned to live comedy in 2024 with Let's Tidy Up, written with the playwright Lally Katz. It played Arts Centre Melbourne from 9 to 21 April 2024 as part of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Reviewing for Time Out on 19 March 2024, Winnie Stubbs gave it four stars and called it "erratic but engaging, wicked-smart but infinitely endearing", describing a show that used the domestic chore of tidying to get at the myth of self-improvement, the ordinariness of mediocrity and his ADHD and autism diagnoses.

The show then travelled. Its New York premiere ran at the SoHo Playhouse on Vandam Street from 12 to 23 June 2024, with previews from 12 June and an official opening on 14 June, playing 75 minutes with stories about skydiving, a chair bag and a love affair alongside the ostensible subject of household mess. It went on to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe that August. The Guardian gave it four stars and called it "disarmingly relatable", and that line, dated 2024, now sits on every venue listing for the tour that followed. Glam Adelaide rated it four and a half stars and called it "light-hearted, somewhat awkward and self-deprecating fun".

Jiggle, Jiggle: this year he just wants to have fun

The new hour, Jiggle, Jiggle, premiered at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in the Fairfax Theatre at Arts Centre Melbourne at the end of March 2026. The promoter's copy carries Thomas's own framing: "This year I just want to have fun. Jiggle, jiggle." After twenty years of stand-up built on heavy themes, the pitch is a deliberately lighter show.

The Melbourne reviews agreed on the tone and split on how well it holds. Vivien Lynch of It's On The House, reviewing on 1 April 2026, rated it three out of five and called it "a charming and colourful hour of comedy", light on its feet but no less meaningful, arguing that the deeper themes of his earlier work are not abandoned so much as refracted through a more playful lens. Greg Gorton of Theatre Travels, reviewing the same Fairfax Theatre run, was warmer, calling it "the kind of feel-good stand-up comedy we need" and writing that this more mature Thomas surpasses the already accomplished comedian of a decade ago. He also noted the show is "delightfully apolitical", though Thomas still shares his beliefs on his own terms.

Both reviews describe the same central device: Thomas has learnt magic, badly, and performs tricks with cheap props bought from Alibaba in a room small enough for the audience to see exactly how poor his technique is. Gorton mentions a cameo appearance he keeps as a secret weapon, and personal stories covering love, sex, a mobile-gaming addiction and strange episodes involving friends. In Melbourne the show finished with a meet-and-greet, with Thomas doing tricks for donations to Médecins Sans Frontières.

On the road from September to December 2026

Having premiered the show in Australia, Thomas is now taking it across three continents. The North American leg opened at Dynasty Typewriter in Los Angeles on 9 September 2026 and runs through Austin's State Theatre on 11 September, Denver, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle's Neptune Theatre, before a long Canadian stretch from Vancouver's Vogue Theatre on 20 September through Victoria, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Halifax, Toronto's Elgin Theatre on 3 October, London Ontario, Hamilton, Ottawa and Montreal's Olympia on 9 October. The east coast follows: Somerville near Boston, Washington's Sixth & I synagogue, two nights at New York's Gramercy Theatre on 16 and 17 October, Philadelphia, Raleigh, Atlanta, Clearwater, Minneapolis and a Chicago date at The Den on 29 October.

Britain and Europe take November and December. A six-night run at Underbelly Boulevard in Soho from 3 to 8 November is followed by Sheffield, Birmingham and Leeds at The Glee clubs, then Amsterdam's Boom Chicago on 20 November, Rotterdam, Copenhagen's Hotel Cecil, two nights in Berlin, two at Hamburg's Imperial Theatre, and a final English swing through Bristol, Manchester, Brighton Dome's Studio on 6 December and Cambridge Junction on 9 December.

As of early September 2026 the promoter's listings show the first New York night, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, the late show in Copenhagen, both Berlin nights and the second Hamburg night as sold out, with San Francisco, Victoria, Halifax, London Ontario, the second New York night and Chicago marked as selling fast. Ticket prices sit around fifty to sixty dollars in North America and twenty-five to thirty pounds in Britain, with the Soho run from £26.50 including fees. The demand pattern is telling: Thomas built his following through streaming rather than broadcast, and the sold-out rooms are in the cities where Please Like Me travelled by word of mouth.