Randy Feltface

Born in a corporate training video

The character has one of the least glamorous origin stories in comedy. Randy was built for a workplace bullying presentation called What's A Bully To You?, in which the same puppet played both "Beverly" and "Randy" depending on which costume it was wearing. The presentation did not take off. Around 2005 Heath McIvor, who had created the character with Philip Millar, repurposed the puppet for stand-up instead.

McIvor's background is in theatre puppetry rather than comedy clubs — he started with Melbourne's Polyglot Theatre in 1993, more than a decade before Randy took a microphone. That grounding shows in the work. The puppetry is not presented as a trick to be admired; it is simply the delivery mechanism for an hour of material, and McIvor spends the show in plain view and largely ignored.

Randy's first solo hour, Randy's Postcards From Purgatory, arrived at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in 2009 and picked up a Golden Gibbo nomination. The following year he won the festival's Barry Award, which is the main prize at MICF and rarely goes to anything with a hand inside it.

The Sammy J years

For most of the early 2010s Randy worked as half of a double act with the Melbourne comedian and musician Sammy J. The partnership produced Ricketts Lane in 2010, Bin Night in 2011, The Inheritance in 2012 and Sammy J & Randy: The Arena Spectacular in 2013, followed by An Evening with Sammy J & Randy in 2015 and Sammy J and Randy Land in 2016. Bin Night earned an ARIA nomination in 2013 and the pair's live album another in 2015.

The partnership also produced television. Sammy J & Randy in Ricketts Lane ran on the ABC in 2015, a flatshare sitcom in which one of the flatmates happened to be a puppet and nobody in the world of the show remarked on it. That refusal to explain the puppet has been the governing rule of the character ever since.

Alongside the double act, Randy kept building solo hours: Randy is Sober across 2011 to 2013, The Last Temptation of Randy in 2013 and 2014, and Randy Writes a Novel in 2015. Perth's Fringe World gave him its Best Comedy award in 2014.

Going it alone, and going online

Randy Writes a Novel marked the point at which the act's reach stopped being Australian. The show — a lecture-shaped hour about a terrible unpublished manuscript — circulated widely online, much of it through uploads Randy did not control, and built an audience in countries he had never toured. Solo hours followed at a steady clip: The Book of Randicus in 2018, Modus Operandy in 2020, Purple Privilege in 2021, Inhale, Exile and Alien of Extraordinary Ability in 2022, Feltopia in 2023 and First Banana in 2024.

The business model is unusual for a comedian at this level. Promotional copy used by his 2026 venues describes a dozen solo stand-up shows and eight self-released comedy specials, distributed independently rather than through a streaming platform, plus a Best Comedy nomination at the Edinburgh Fringe. His only significant platform work has been peripheral: a US television debut on NBC's Bring The Funny in 2019 and an appearance in Aunty Donna's Big Ol' House of Fun on Netflix in 2020.

First Banana, reviewed four stars by Squirrel Comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe in August 2024, shows the method at full stretch. Two strands run in parallel — the commercial history of the banana and its consequences, and Randy's own life as measured by the contents of a storage unit — pulled together with impressions, political material, a singalong and a finale involving his parents. The reviewer flagged one long tangent about the composition of Big Bird's feathers as the point where the room briefly drifted.

Radio 4, and a name the BBC keeps calling back

The BBC has become the character's most consistent broadcast home. Randy Feltface's Destruction Manual, a four-part Radio 4 series on how to accelerate climate change and finish the job, aired in 2024. Chortle reported on 30 June 2026 that a second series had been commissioned: Human Handbook, an examination of the human animal from early hominids to the environmental mess of the present day. It was recorded in front of an audience at the Pleasance Theatre in London on 8 and 15 August 2026.

Radio suits the act better than television does, which is a strange thing to say about a puppet. The writing carries the show; the felt is a framing device rather than the joke.

Gimmick, and the diary through 2027

The current hour, Gimmick, premiered in 2025 and takes the obvious criticism as its premise. The pitch used across its venue listings is blunt: he has spent his career denying that he is nothing more than a gimmick, and has decided to own it. The material runs to observational comedy, cultural commentary and existential digression, with the puppet's own status as a bit made explicit rather than ignored.

The tour has been continuous since. Through late 2025 the show worked American clubs — a three-night stand at Dr Grins in Grand Rapids from 11 to 13 December 2025 with doubles on the Friday and Saturday, tickets at $32.95 — before moving up into UK theatres in February and March 2026, promoted by AEG. The Newcastle date at the Tyne Theatre & Opera House on 1 March 2026 was a 7.30pm start at £29.25 to £44.25, rated 14 and over. North American theatre dates continued through 2026.

On 31 August 2026 TEG Dainty announced the Australia and New Zealand leg: 20 shows opening in Wellington on 1 February 2027, Christchurch on 2 February and Auckland on 3 February, then across Australia from 5 February to Darwin on 5 March. The run mixes large rooms — Melbourne's Palais Theatre on 10 February, Sydney's State Theatre — with regional stops including Geelong on 12 February, Alice Springs, Toowoomba and Caloundra. Tickets went on general sale at 10am local time on 3 September 2026.

Speaking to Revue in Grand Rapids in December 2025, McIvor was candid about the cost of the schedule. "I'm tired," he said, with the calendar already booked into 2027. On the United States: "It's the best country in the world to do comedy, I think."

How the trick actually works

The craft point that keeps coming up in coverage is that audiences stop registering the puppetry within minutes, which is the opposite of what a novelty act wants. McIvor described Gimmick to Revue as "such a fun, silly, kind of fast-paced show", and the pace is doing real work — there is no time to examine the mechanics.

Crowd work is the other counter-intuitive element. Randy's short-form audience exchanges are what circulate on social media and have brought a large part of the current ticket-buying audience, but McIvor treats them as a tool rather than a set: "I never go to crowd work because I'm in trouble," he told Revue, describing it instead as something that lifts and enhances a show that is already written. The Squirrel Comedy review of First Banana made the same observation from the other side of the footlights, noting that newer online fans may be surprised how little of it there is.