Sarah Kendall

Sarah Kendall (born 3 August 1976) is an Australian comedian from Newcastle, New South Wales. She won the Raw Comedy competition in 1998 and appeared regularly on Australian television. She moved to the United Kingdom in 2000 at the age of 24. Early life Kendall grew up in Newcastle, New South Wales and attended Merewether High School. She moved on to Sydney University at the age of 18. She began her career in 1996 partaking in the annual 'Review' show. Of it she said: “It started at university where there was a stand-up competition which some of my friends said I should do but I was too scared to do it. I was a genuine coward about it all and that in itself started to bug me, so eventually I got up on stage. I hated every single minute of it and was sick beforehand. But that made even more determined because I couldn’t work out why my fear was so disproportionate to the thing I was doing. It was just me talking for five minutes and so what if I got booed off stage. After about seven or eight years I eventually got it under control.” Stand-up comedy Kendall has performed solo shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe since 2003, with her 2004 show being nominated for the Perrier award. She has also performed in the Melbourne Comedy Festival since 2000. Kendall talked about how she has reviewed her own comic response to a heckler who threatened her with sexual violence during a routine in an article in The Guardian on 2 August 2014. She said, "I built a routine around it – but looking back, I betrayed the seriousness of the incident". Kendall remarked that she dropped the routine because it started to sit uncomfortably with her.