Perfectly Hilarious
Sophie Quick, Editor
Medical student and stand-up comedian Noah Szto (2017) is fighting a lifelong battle with chronic perfectionism. His progress so far has been woeful.
Sunday 1 December 2024
Noah Szto holds himself to punishingly high standards. At College, he excelled in his studies in Biomedicine, was a serial Ormond Scholar, and starred in productions of Chicago, Footloose and Legally Blonde. In his final year at College, he was Chair of the General Committee. (His close friend Ella Swaney, featured page 26, served alongside him as Vice Chair).Szto left Ormond in 2019 and took a gap year to pursue his passion for comedy before starting the Doctor of Medicine in 2021. In 2023, he challenged himself to write a whole hour of stand-up comedy for the Melbourne Fringe Festival. This debut hour was called Success in Everything, and was all about his attempts to embrace failure and relax his stringent self-imposed standards.‘Success is an hour of jokes and stories that I haphazardly threw together in an effort to challenge my rampant perfectionism,’ he explains. But perhaps ‘haphazard’ isn’t really Szto’s style. The show was polished, professional and hilarious. He took out the Comedy New Work Award.‘The award was very nice and a big surprise – but it probably set my personal development back a decade,’ he jokes.Szto reprised Success in Everything for the 2024 Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF) and – in another public setback to his recovery as a perfectionist – took home the Best Newcomer Award.Now in the final semester of his medical degree, Szto is working on a new show combining comedy and cabaret. It’s called Med School.‘I think anyone who knew me at Ormond would be able to tell you that my heart was always with the arts,’ he says. ‘So this new show is all about my reluctant journey through medicine.’Broaching a range of topics from prostate exams to delivering babies, Med School will see Szto incorporating music into his comedy for the first time.‘I think musical comedy allows you to be a little more whimsical in a way you can’t be with straight stand-up. The material in this show could be a bit heavy otherwise.’Besides mining his medical degree for material, does he see any of his skills in comedy as transferable to medicine, and vice versa?‘Honestly, I don’t think so,’ he laughs. ‘They’re pretty radically different jobs, so I try to keep my worlds separate for fear of accidentally being too funny at the serious place or too serious at the funny place. Case in point: the term for doing well in comedy is “killing,” which I don’t think Hippocrates would be too happy about.’Szto’s heart might be with comedy, but, having come this far, he still plans to complete his medical training and see where it takes him.As part of his MICF award, Szto has received a grant to travel to London to perform a run at Soho Theatre. He’ll take the trip in 2026. In the meantime, he’ll be working as a doctor, fine-tuning his Med School show and keeping his eyes out for other creative opportunities.‘Being a comedian is a great way to sneak into some really interesting projects. I’d love the chance to work in film and TV one day!’ First Published in New & Old Magazine | Issue No. 104 December 2024
I think anyone who knew me at Ormond would be able to tell you that my heart was always with the arts.
Noah Szto (2017)
