Meet Mel McGlensey, bringing her wildly inventive and hilariously raunchy show, Motorboat, to the Adelaide Fringe for the last time. Part clowning, part audience participation, and entirely unforgettable, Motorboat is a feminist romp that explores self-discovery, body positivity, and the joy of being unapologetically yourself—even if that self happens to be a sexy little boat.

We sat down with Mel for a pixelated pint to chat about the origins of Motorboat, how they navigate consent and audience participation, and what it’s like to perform as a character who’s equal parts Betty Boop and nautical vessel.

You can catch Motorboat at The Bally at Gluttony as part of Adelaide Fringe from Tuesday 20th February until Sunday 3rd March at 8:45pm (60mins). Tickets are available through the Adelaide Fringe Box Office.

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Moss: Hi, Mel. Your show Motorboat is about someone who is part boat and part woman. Can you tell us a bit more about this character and what audiences can expect from the show?

Mel: Yeah, I am a grown woman with a couple of degrees and some accomplishments and yet I have chosen to spend an hour on stage pretending to be a sexy little boat. And that’s really the gist of it. Motorboat is like kind of a naive Betty Boop-esque character who is a boat. I use her to tell a story about kind of self-discovery, self-actualization. It’s kind of a feminist romp including a lot of boat terminology.

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Moss: You described your work as being about body positivity and feminism. Can you tell me a bit more about what those subjects mean to you and where you choose to focus on them in your work?

Mel: I don’t think I have a choice. I think my work is going to be about these things, whether I want it to or not. And with my last show, my last show was a political satire that was really kind of dark and heavy. I decided with Motorboat to just embrace telling the same stories and kind of circling the same themes, but in a way that is like as much fun as possible. I very much subscribe to the “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down” theory when it comes to kind of hiding theme and important messages in your work, but making it as delicious and delectable as possible. So yeah, Motorboat is first and foremost a really fun, great time. It’s first and foremost, hilarious, raunchy, and a bit of escapism. But of course, there are those deeper messages and deeper themes there that you can choose to engage with.

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Moss: You first conceived as the titular part of the show in the école Gaulier. How did your experience there shape you as a comedian?

Mel: It was transformative for me. It really was. Before attending the school, I was making comedy that was quite cerebral. I was very standy-talky and I wasn’t using all of the tools at my disposal. I was ignoring one giant tool, my body, and that kind of feeds into the body positivity feminist message of the piece.

I thought that in order to be a woman on stage in my body, which is often considered non-normative, especially for bodies that are on stage, I thought that I had to be as still as possible and kind of try to disappear in my corporeal form.

The school taught me all the ways in which that, A) wasn’t going to work, and B) was the wrong approach.

So it really gave me permission to fully inhabit my body and to lean into what are the ways in which I can tell stories with this body that I can’t with any other body. So, to be a bit crass about that, for me, that was like, I have these large breasts and how do I tell a story with them that is funny and meaningful?

It’s funny because people are like, there’s no way you can be philosophical about motorboating. And I’m like, you absolutely can.

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Moss: Could you tell me a bit about your relationship with the crew behind the scenes and how it’s evolved since starting this show?

Mel: It has evolved a lot. It will be one year in Feb at Adelaide Fringe, actually. It premiered there a year ago. And it is first and foremost, you know, a product of my collaboration with my director, Sharnema Nougar.

It’s really our collaboration at its core. But then I also had a lot of help from my sound designer, Max Paton. He was at clown school with me the first summer I did it and started throwing sound effects at me and seeing how I reacted to them as a boat, which sort of was the genesis of the show. And then I also collaborated with my partner, who’s a video game designer, to do a lot of the more interactive elements.

That’s Douglas Wilson, and he helped me design how we want, from a games perspective, the audience to play with me. And that also involved some innovation on the motorboat manual, which is like a book I have in the show that enables the crowd to interact with me on different levels. That’s quite fun!

It’s a very audience participation heavy show. But it was important to me to find different levels for the audience to participate at. Because, spoiler alert! The largest amount of participation is I’m actually asking someone from the audience to motorboat me at some point. And that’s a big ask, I think, for a lot of people. So, I work my way up there by starting really small events. One of the first asks is like, “Hey, that motorboat manual sitting there, can you read me the instructions, or can you find this diagram?” It’s a gradual ramping up of the involvement.

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Moss: What’s the process for coming up with that sort of safe, gradual escalation of things. How do you workshop something like that?

Mel: Consent in a clown show is something I spend a lot of time thinking about because there is a power dynamic at play and there is social pressure there. So I’m always thinking about “How can I do this in a way that is safe for audience members without killing the joy and the fun?”.

For me, that just meant a lot of workshopping it online, on stage, on my feet, at gigs. So the initial, like, five- to ten-minute bit that this show is based on, I must have performed that, like, 30 times before I ever even wrote the show, just trying to figure out, “What is the best way to get what I want from the audience without making anyone feel like they were really pushed past a boundary that they had?”.

Moss: And have there been shows where the motorboating part doesn’t actually happen?

Mel: Oh, absolutely. Plenty of them. Fewer and fewer recently. And it often is just speaks more to where I’m performing it. Like I just got back from doing a full run in Edinburgh. And I think I had one show out of the 25 or 30 shows I did there where no one motorboated me. But when I’m in Melbourne, I frequently have them. Melbourne audiences are famously a bit more cautious and shy.

In Adelaide, I think I only had a couple nights where no one wanted to. Adelaide audiences are a bit more up for it. But yeah, I have backup plans stacked on backup plans just in case. Because at the end of the day, whatever the audience chooses is the right choice. And we will play with whatever they’re bringing into the room.

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Moss: Can you tell me a bit more about how different those experiences are performing in Edinburgh and across the world?

Mel: Yeah, it’s funny because I say it’s a different show every time I perform it, but it’s really true because it’s a different show in every space. I find new and different things in each space.

And then it’s also in a different culture, in a different setting. This year I performed it at home. I haven’t performed at home in the States for so long, But I was able to bring it to the Hollywood Fringe and that was a totally different experience. Not just because my family was in the audience, but I really think each audience brings a new energy and something intangibly different to it every time.

Having said that, I have a real soft spot for Adelaide audiences, because that is where I premiered this show last year, and so they kind of helped me build this show. I didn’t really know what it was when I first performed it in Adelaide last year, and I sort of built it over the whole month.

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Moss: How much has it changed since then? How much of the audience is going to recognize the show that you brought last year to the one you’re bringing this year?

Mel: Oh, they’ll definitely recognize it. The bones are the same, but I think kind of the sinew and the muscle and the tissue is always changing. I think it’s much tighter. Last year it was its debut season, so I was still figuring it out. And now I would like to think I’ve still left a lot of room for play, but it is definitely we’re running a tighter ship now, pun intended.

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Moss: What are you hoping audiences take away from Motorboat?

Mel: I love it when audiences tell me they’ve never seen anything like that. It’s a comment I get not infrequently, but every time I really appreciate it because I did set out to make something unique, something different, something special and not the same as your average show you can see in any stand-up comedy club any night.

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Moss: Maybe this is more personal curiosity, but in what way is the character part boat? Like, is the character literally a boat?

Mel: It’s so funny because you’d think that I would get asked this question more, but people don’t ask this, and I expected to get a lot more of this question, but I normally just don’t answer because I don’t really know.

I think, I think she’s all boat, but she’s also all woman. And she’s definitely all clown but if you come see the show, she will tell you which specific parts of her are which parts of the boat. There’s a whole section called the tour of the boat where I just point at parts of my body and tell you what parts of the boat they are.

It is an unanswerable question, and I think in that, that is the point, is that we don’t know where boat ends and woman begins.

Moss: They both have the same pronouns.

Mel: And men are weird about both of them.

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Moss: What are you looking forward to most at the Adelaide Fringe?

Mel: I love the Adelaide Fringe. I look forward to it all year.

I’m really, really looking forward to my first year in Gluttony. I have been wandering those grounds, you know, for years as an emerging and aspiring comedian, just in awe of like the kinds of shows they program there and the energy that comes from those tent walls. So I’m really, really excited about filling one of them with my boat.

Because I think, you know, this show was born in a tent and it deserves to be in a tent. That’s the kind of show it is.

Moss: If motorboat were a drink, it could be alcoholic, non-alcoholic, caffeinated, really whatever floats your boat. What kind of drink would it be?

Mel: That’s interesting because the answer is different than if you asked me what she, the titular character would, because she’s a Shirley Temple. But I think the show is like a tequila sunrise or something like that.

Because she’s all innocent and naivete, but the show is like a bit raunchy and raucous. But ultimately delicious. So I’d say Tequila Sunrise.

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You can catch Motorboat at The Bally at Gluttony as part of Adelaide Fringe from Tuesday 20th February until Sunday 3rd March at 8:45pm (60mins). Tickets are available through the Adelaide Fringe Box Office.