Comedy Lock-In
At about 11.45 pm I was standing in line waiting to go into the show and talking to my friend Cameron. Little did we know that over the next seven hours Cameron would have a starring role in one of the bigger events of the 2006 Comedy Festival.
That’s one of the joys of a Daniel Kitson gig – you never know where he’s going to go, and you never know what he’s going to do with you along the way. You just know that he’s going to do something with the audience. When the gig is seven hours long, all bets are off.
The line-up for the night was a cavalcade of top end comedians (Pete Rowsthorn, Greg Fleet, Charlie Pickering, Michael Chamberlin, Sam Simmons, Eddie Perfect, David O’Doherty, and Fiona O’Loughlin), which would have cost several hundred dollars had you tried to see them all separately. Even then, some acts (like the Umbilical Brothers) busted out some classic material that you won’t be seeing anywhere else. But the person who got the most cheers was audience member Cameron, who had been adopted as almost a sidekick by Kitson for the night. Kitson could have kept those cheers for himself, but he seemed to take an almost childish glee in turning his gargantuan intellect towards sharing the glory with select audience members. That’s probably why more than a hundred people lasted all the way until seven in the morning, a feat that any other MC would have struggled to match.
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Midnight to Dawn Festival Club – 30/04/06 @ Hi-Fi Bar, Melbourne – by epod
This event was originally a 20 hour comedy event, called “The Comedy Lock-in”, which I had paid $120 for, only to find out a few days prior to arriving in Melbourne that it had been cancelled. My original thoughts on attending the 20 hour event was that I would pay my money and if I even lasted 10 hours, I would have more than got my moneys worth, considering the amount of awesome comedy acts on the bill.
Instead it was replaced by this 7 hour comedy event, which was an unbelievably cheap price of only $25, with an awesome lineup to match. Although I was a little disappointed that some of the previously advertised acts did not appear on the night, it was still an amazing gig to be a part of.
Daniel Kitson was the MC for the night. Had he not been the MC, I believe that things could have fallen apart very quickly. The $25 entry fee was worth it just to see Mr Kitson. He appointed an official time keeper, Cameron, who did a great job saying what the time was everytime Daniel encouraged the audience to yell, “What’s the time Cameron?”. The audience was also treated to a number of different backdrop curtains during the night, which provided a bit of variety. The shiny gold and pink curtains were not kind to my very sore eyes though, so I was glad when they were removed!
The performers that impressed me were Daniel Kitson, Peter Rowsthorn, The Umbilical Brothers, Charlie Pickering & Micheal Chamberlin, Eddie Perfect and David O’Doherty. The absolute highlight of the night for me, other than the “time checks”, were Freestyle Love Supreme, who did a great job of waking me up at around 430am in the morning. Daniel Kitson didn’t seem to like their rapping, beatboxing and drum beats though, as he said they were giving him a headache!
Stuff that didn’t really impress me were Greg Fleet and Alan Brough, reading from their script of Interrogation, and still not being able to get it right! The Tibaldi Brothers put me to sleep. Sam Simmons was just too weird for me to understand, although some of the pictures that he was flipping through on stage were mildly amusing. Birdmann is someone else whose idea of comedy I just didn’t enjoy, and I proceeded to almost go to sleep during his set. He was good at what he was doing, just not my sort of thing.
In the early hours of the morning, a vase was bought on stage, and Daniel requested that the audience go across the road to the flower shop one by one and purchase one flower, and then put it in the vase. A steady stream of audience members disappeared momentarily while they did this, and not long after, Daniel had a full vase of flowers on stage. Berocca, Red Bull and Milo drinks were handed around to the audience at some point, but I missed out on getting one as I was probably too enthralled in what was going on onstage.
After a pretty huge day prior to attending this event, with virtually no sleep, I was wanting to leave at around 4am but a rather good band started up, by the name of, “Martin Martini & The Bone Palace Orchestra”, so I stayed on. At around 630am, I had pushed myself so hard to stay awake but I was just about to fall over. There was a comedian on at the time called Gordon Southern. At any other time I would have probably found him highly amusing, but I was so tired that not a lot of what he was saying was making any sense.
I really wanted to stay until the end of the gig, and kept telling myself that there was only half an hour to go, but I just couldn’t! So I made my way out of the Festival Club, very happy, but tired after an awesome night out. Yes, I am still very disappointed in myself for not lasting the distance, but am glad that I almost made it through the entire gig and did not need to be taken out of the Hi-fi bar on a stretcher!
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