Our Values
Our Core Behaviours
Our core behaviours describe how we hold ourselves accountable to the kind of community we want to create. They describe how we teach, improvise, and run Only the Human.
Be Playful
Support Growth
Respect Boundaries
Build Community
Collaborate Fearlessly
Make Things Happen
The first three are core parts of our Conditions of Participation which underpin how we teach at Only the Human. As players spend more time with us, the other behaviours become important as well.
Diversity and Inclusion
Our core belief is that everybody is creative and we can all make each other laugh. However, comedy has not historically been a place in which marginalised and discriminated groups have felt safe and included. In many cases, comedy has been used as a tool to entrench racism, deepen oppression and alienate non-majority voices.
We believe that laughter binds rather than divides, so we use comedy for good at Only the Human.
Our Diversity and Inclusion vision is:
To create and maintain a safe and inclusive culture where those who can demonstrate our core behaviours feel welcome to participate in the community, both on stage and off stage.
To dismantle the cultural barriers which prevent diverse people from entering into and participating in comedy in Perth.
To ensure diverse representation across membership, key decision-making roles (especially our board), faculty, and in performances.
A strong social justice orientated internal culture in which all members take responsibility.
A reputation within the Perth comedy community for being an exemplar of diversity, inclusion, and physical and psychological safety.
Our goals:
Holding ourselves accountable to the above core behaviours.
Making our classes and workshops safe, accessible and inclusive.
Normalising difficult conversations about power and privilege.
Being willing to try things, fail, and learn from them.
Providing scholarships for our classes and workshops.
Individually and collectively celebrating our diversity.
Making diversity and inclusion a board-level responsibility.
Collecting data on diversity and holding ourselves accountable to it.
Following the lead of our members in deciding where, and how, to focus our efforts.
Our limitations:
Our company is young and is entirely self-sustained. This work is supported entirely by passionate, active individuals who want to make comedy accessible and inclusive to all. Many of those individuals are themselves from marginalised groups and/or the victims of systemic injustice. This means that our work is undergirded by a need to establish clear boundaries, manage emotional labour for our people, and act strategically in how we manage our limited resources.
As improvisation is a collaborative art, all courses assume a level of self-awareness and self-management. This means our classes may not be appropriate for people with an acute mental health condition, trauma, or complex needs. Improvisation is therapeutic, but it is not therapy. We cannot coach individuals through personal challenges and our staff and contractors are not healthcare professionals.