The first couple of comedy

As Anne Edmonds signs on to host Ten's upcoming Talkin' 'Bout Your Gen, proud partner Lloyd Langford is by her side to cheer her on - and share a laugh or two.

- TIFFANY DUNK

When Anne Edmonds was around the same age as her daughter, Gwen, who turns four in October, she asked her parents for a microphone.

A born performer, Anne carried that microphone along with a little beatbox everywhere she went, putting on impromptu performances for her family at any given opportunity.

“It was often broken,” she says today, as she and her partner, fellow comedian Lloyd Langford, sit down to chat with The Weekly. “It never made sense. I’d be plugging it in, and it wouldn’t work. It’s only now, as a parent, that I realise it wasn’t broken at all.”

At this, the pair laugh, giving each other the knowing look of those who’ve discovered plenty of things about their parents’ hidden tactics in the process of raising their own child.

Gwen, they add, has definitely inherited the performing gene. It could be handy, Lloyd jokes, given the duo often hit the comedy circuit together as a double act.

“We just need Gwen to work on her opening act, and we could be a travelling vaudeville family,” adds Anne. “She is really funny, she gets genuine laughs. She does little performances where we have to sit and watch along with 20 toys all lined up. And she has different characters. She did a Swedish lady for a while. And there’s a man called Trevor with a moustache. We are role playing from morning to dusk in our house.”

A late bloomer

Anne came to comedy relatively late, at the age of 28. She grew up, she says, “in a very Catholic, Australian, suburban, middle-class family with two parents and a brother and a sister,” in Melbourne’s Strathmore.