Baz McAlister

Like all the best superheroes, Baz McAlister is a journalist by day, but at night he leads a secret double life. Sneaking out of the house he heads for the insalubrious side of town, wields a microphone, and fights crime… with stand-up comedy*. However, he does not wear his underpants outside his trousers – sorry, ladies.

Baz was brought up in Northern Ireland about four decades ago, and has since given his drinking arm a solid workout while living in other rough-as-guts places with colourful, barely intelligible locals – such as Glasgow, Leeds, and now Brisbane.

He’s a nerd with a love of clever humour and wordplay, and his comedy tends to gravitate towards musings on movies, music, TV shows, comic books, pop culture, and discussing the big issues – like who would win if The Hulk fought The Thing. Let’s face it, he makes The Big Bang Theory look like Q&A.

Baz has been jumping up at comedy clubs around Australia since early 2008; he was a Queensland state finalist in Raw Comedy twice, competed in Green Faces, chaired comedy debates and has warmed up for a gaggle of great comics in his time, including Des Bishop, Justin Hamilton and Greg Fleet. In Baz’s opinion, comedians in the vein of Patton Oswalt, Doug Stanhope, Louis CK and Jamie Kilstein (to name a few) do comedy the way it should be done.

Outside of comedy and the newspaper biz, Baz has burnt out two Xboxes through over-use and when not eating, drinking or gaming to excess, he’s labouring to finish about ten film screenplays and three novels, 90 per cent of which involve zombies. He occasionally pays attention to his wife.

*(The actual effects of Baz’s comedy on national crime statistics have never been satisfactorily quantified.)