Oh, Maeve, Maeve, Maeve. You’re cute, and I love those beautiful 50s-homemaker-style dresses you wear on stage. You love funny pictures of animals, and so do I. You enjoy a bit of self-deprecation, and I love it too. I can just imagine us getting along really well – we’d sit down to a pot of tea and some freshly made cake, and you’d make me laugh so hard with your clever stories that I’d snort tea out of my nose. Really truly. I do think you’re funny.

But Maeve, you need to lose the props. And perform to smaller rooms. Kitten Brides, while not as prop-riddled as last year’s Ha Ha Yum (where cakes were baked on stage – tasty but ultra distracting), still had its fair share of unnecessary items. Porcelain animals that have no real purpose apart from sitting there looking kitschy and silly belong on the mantelpiece of a sharehouse lounge room, not on the stage of a standup gig.

And the size of the room? Well, a large room and a comedian with a tendency to criticise themselves just a little bit too much simply doesn’t seem to work. OK, so it was a preview, but the three-quarters-full room could smell your nervousness, Maeve, and didn’t respond well to you telling them you don’t think you’re a very good comedian. Please don’t tell us that! It’s simply not true.

I hope next year you still come to Melbourne, Maeve, and you get a smaller room, ditch those props (you really really can do without them), and suck the punters into your zany, funny world – full of poker-faced cats, squeaking rhubarbs and evil ex-boyfriends that deserve to die.

Finished reading this article? You might also like:

• Andy Muirhead in Saturday Night At The Library
• Nik Coppin – Loquacious
• Storytellers’ Club