Aunty Donna

Aunty Donna was formed in 2011 after its five original members (Mark Bonanno, Broden Kelly, Joe Kosky, Sam Lingham, and Zachary Ruane) met at University of Ballarat's Arts Academy.[3] Kelly has stated that the original vision for the group was to focus on theatre and live shows only, and they never envisioned aspects of their career such as the YouTube channel and podcast. Their first live show, Aunty Donna in Pantsuits, debuted in 2012.

Composer Tom Armstrong and director Max Miller joined the group soon after its founding, while members Adrian Dean and Joe Kosky departed Aunty Donna to pursue other ventures, bringing the group to the current six members. Bonanno, Kelly, and Ruane refer to themselves as writers and performers while Armstrong, Lingham, and Miller work mostly behind the scenes.

Aunty Donna stated on their podcast that their live shows are "deep down, what [they] are most passionate about".[4] As such, they try to plan and perform one live show per year.

In December 2012, Aunty Donna created Aunty Donna's Rumpus Room, a seven-part web series which originally aired on C31 Melbourne and its YouTube channel. Since its start, the Aunty Donna channel has reached a total of 97 million views and 500,000 subscribers (as of April 2022). Much of its YouTube content is based on content adapted from its live shows, and many of the group's original YouTube videos become adapted for their live shows.

Aunty Donna's YouTube content is organized by the group into different series. These series include:

• Rumpus Room (2012)
• Fortnightly Fap Off (2013)
• Fapé in the Cafe (2013)
• Fresh Blood (2014)
• Haven't You Done Well? (ongoing)
• 1999 (2015/2016)[5]
• Trendy (2016)
• Ripper Aussie Summer (2017)
• BEST CONTENT EVER!!1! (2017)
• Aunty Donna: The Album (2018)
• Camp Bush Camp (2018)
• Glennridge Secondary College (2019)

Typically, the videos released in these series are unified by a setting or theme, such as in Glennridge Secondary College, in which most sketches takes place in a fictionalized secondary school, and Trendy, which pokes fun at cultural trends of the mid-2010s. Haven't You Done Well? is an ongoing series consisting of one video from each of the other series. All of these are unified by their loose structure, relying more heavily on improvisation than the other videos from the group and often resulting in the group making a mess of the set with a particular item, such as sunscreen, beer, wine, cake, or prop cocaine. 1999 was originally developed as a 10-part web series exclusively for YouTube as part of Screen Australia and Google's Skip Ahead funding.

In 2015, the group created Aunty Donna, a half-hour television pilot for ABC and Screen Australia as part of the inaugural Fresh Blood Pilot Season comedy initiative, but the series was not picked up by ABC.

In 2017, the group announced a half-hour pilot, Chaperones, which was created with Australian online streaming service Stan.

In 2020, Aunty Donna launched their Netflix original series, Aunty Donna's Big Ol' House of Fun, with six episodes of varying length. To promote their new show, they teamed up with I Did a Thing and Aleksa Vulovic to recreate the Utah monolith in Australia.[6][7] The show was received positively.

The group began a self-titled podcast in mid-2016, releasing weekly episodes. The podcast involves random riffing and improvised segments, and occasionally includes special guests such as comedians Ben Russell, Tim Minchin, Bob Saget, Demi Lardner, Michelle Brasier, Rove McManus, and others. The podcast has since changed towards focusing more on how sketches, characters, and comedic ideas develop during the groups' creative process, but remains very loose in structure.

In 2018, Aunty Donna announced they would be releasing their debut album The Album on 6 April 2018. On 9 February 2018, Aunty Donna released the first single from the album, "Chuffed (Dad Song)", and accompanying video. The album debuted at No. 30 on the ARIA Albums Chart.[8]

• Official website
• Aunty Donna's channel on YouTube