Joseph Green remembers the exact moment he decided that his Elwood apartment would be the perfect venue for his first solo stand-up show, Ah Yes, The Music.

“I sat down in my bedroom, looking into the lounge room,” he says. “And I started thinking, where should I do it? And I just thought, I could do it right here.”

While performing in his lounge room is certainly a new experience, Green is by no means a stranger to the stage. After studying theatre at Monash University, Green moved to Sydney and then to New York, where he trained with a theatre company for several years, before returning home to Melbourne in 2014.

Green’s most recent stage credit was in The Sol III Company’s production of The Exonerated in Melbourne this past May. First performed in the US in 2002, The Exonerated explores the American justice system through the stories of six wrongfully convicted inmates. Green was cast as Gary Gauger, a man who spent almost three years on death row after being falsely accused of murdering his parents in 1993.

Even in those darkest moments representing a real-life tragedy, Green was able to find a playfulness in his character, exploring the relationship between drama and comedy. He says that this relationship informs his comedy, too.

“There was sort of a lightness to [the play] that we were encouraged to seek out, and that’s what most of comedy is – transmuting these dark parts of ourselves into something with a little bit more lightness to it and something we can laugh at.”

Ah Yes, The Music is not a musical comedy show per se, though it is about music. Green describes it as a show about relationships – both familial and romantic – and growing up with music. The meaning of the title becomes clear during the performance, he says, revealing that his mother once uttered the phrase during her sleep.

Green has been performing stand-up on and off for six years – both in Australia and New York – but this will be the first time in Green’s  career that he’s onstage by himself for a full sixty minutes. Though he finds it a little daunting, he’s encouraged by the fact that many of his  peers have gone on to find creative and commercial success – particularly NOVA breakfast radio host Tommy Little, who started performing stand-up at the same time as Green.

“At that point, [Little] had such great clarity about what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it,” says Green. “At that point I was still at university and I thought, ‘oh, I kind of still want to do this or that or explore this.’ And then when I came home [from New York], I ran into him in the street and he’d just done exactly what he said he’d wanted to do. And that gave me a lot of confidence. You just have to keep failing, or at least risking being an idiot, and that’s the only way you’re going to progress and get a little bit closer to doing exactly what you want to do.”

Joseph Green’s Ah Yes, The Music runs at the Tree House from 17 – 25, 29-30 September, 1 – 3 October at 7pm (5pm on Sunday),and at Long Play Bar on 26 – 27 September at 8pm and 5pm respectively.