Marcus Lambert
The Pun 2009 Reviews »
Like fashion’s foray into flannel, one of this festival’s stronger trends has been 1990s nostalgia. A natural progression from the comic book/cartoon fascination generated by blockbusters and internet download trends, celebrating our youth ironically has been a favourite of thirty-year-old male comics. But on this closing weekend with a final Festival Club headliner, MICF organisers have hooked their rose-tinted Oakleys onto their No Fear T-shirt and instead plucked from overseas a boy born in 1990.
Freshly graduated from school, Bo Burnham is an internet celebrity with a Comedy Channel special already …
The Pun 2009 Reviews »
If people browse the Comedy Festival guide like they surf the internet, the first thing they’ll hit is Sexual Perversity. So it was the first thing The Pun hit.
Audience members entered this four-hander play wearing badges boasting ‘Sexy’ or ‘Perv’ and were greeted at lights up by Muddy Waters’ ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’ and tight brown lounge suits bulging at the crotch. It’s a bar scene and Bernie (David Bramble) sweats sexual animalism as he regales his mate Danny (Ben Griffiths) with last night’s conquest. It could almost be a scene …
The Pun 2009 Reviews »
A show that opens with an uninspired writer trying to write at their desk, but instead miserably eating chocolate, is a bad sign. You can’t help feeling the author’s imagination has gone out the window (which is incidentally the only other prop in this ingeniously stripped-back set design) and that they are just writing exactly what they were doing a few months before the festival.
Luckily, you know not to stop at this potentially bad sign, and for that you’ll be rewarded. This light-hearted caper is enriched with fun, clever writing …
The Pun 2009 Reviews »
This is definitely a comedy show. Writer Keiran King warns “these scripts are made purely to entertain, that’s it – no meanings, no thinking too hard”. There are no themes, narrative threads or messages to learn, just silly antics committed to wholeheartedly by a boisterous cast of five. The sprawling nature of the four main sketches cook up images of inner-urban sharehouse life; renting inspiration from hard rubbish days, television shows and begging drunks.
This is a confident production that entertains you during set changes with quick, funny skits or medleys …
The Pun 2009 Reviews »
Dark thunderclouds meant the transition from day to night started about eight hours earlier than expected last Friday, so it was appropriate to celebrate with Evening: A Cabaret.
Perched in peach-coloured shirts, the band played keyboard and varnished string instruments as they welcomed in the audience. Location is a defining factor of cabaret (smoky nightclubs or themed restaurants being the norm) so the restrained surrounds of the Old Chamber Rooms at Trades Hall gave the Duskbuskers an uphill battle. But hills aren’t so important in modern warfare, and they quickly won …
The Pun 2009 Reviews »
Comicide are a hardworking comedy troupe. Every second weekend they meet to write sketches, and on the alternate weekends they perform them at the Roxbury Hotel in Sydney. The constant turn around and feedback gave Comicide mountains of material to choose from when forming their one-hour MICF show. The four comics – including the director, who had to shift on stage when one member of the group pulled out shortly before the festival – pull off the show with technical aplomb.
Patrick Magee is the star of this show, frequently stealing …
The Pun 2009 Reviews »
Last year at the festival, Sammy J in the Forest of Dreams was a big hit, taking out the Critic’s Award. This year, the co-writer and performing puppeteer from that show, Heath McIvor, is taking the Randy character and giving him his own show. Randy’s Postcards From Purgatory is a wonderful evocation of Randy’s life as he deals with a mid-life crisis brought about by love and longing. Heath’s skills as a puppeteer are so adept you can forget it’s a puppet and just laugh along with his narration. Even …
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