Can comedians make their parents laugh? The Wireless' new series TOUGH CROWD asks the 2017 Billy T Nominees to do the impossible. Watch Angella Dravid tell a joke to her mum Hazel and brother Sean in episode 03.
Running away from home, marrying an older man, being arrested and spending two months in jail is no laughing matter.
Especially when it happens to someone still in her teens.
But one Kiwi stand-up has turned her real-life drama into an award-winning comedy show.
Angella Dravid, 30, has revealed thetrue story that inspired her recent International Comedy Festival hit Down the Rabbit Hole.
The show had a sellout run, won rave reviews and was in such demand she had to perform two shows on her final night.
It wasn't funny at the time. Dravid's story starts in the small South Australian town of Naracoorte in 2004 where she lived with her father after her parents split.
At the age of 17, bored with small town life, she found love online with a much older man.
She lied to her parents and ran away, flying to the UK and moving into the man's Brighton home. A year later, they married. He was 47. She was 18.
It didn't last long. Dravid found herself even more isolated than in Naracoorte, scared to meet new people and struggling to identify with her husband's older friends.
Bored, she started trouble. Things quickly escalated. One night, two years after their wedding, she found a photo of her husband's ex-wife and attacked him with it.
Police were called. She was arrested. And she went to jail.
It was, she said, a relief.
"It took me going to jail to realise I was in a bad relationship," she said.
But she wasn't depressed about it.
"I went into jail in a paddy wagon excited to see what would happen next. Like, 'This could be great'."
