Marcus Lambert
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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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The poster art for Mother Of The Year is tantalising. Catherine Deveny (from The Age and ABC radio) brandishes a boxing glove in front of fellow comedians Nelly Thomas and Christine Basil. The prospect of a bit of biffo between these sharp wits had me really looking forward to the show. It turned out that there wasn’t a lot of actual sparring, but the good news is that the show was still funny. The show’s title and artwork is more a concept that packages the three comedians together – don’t …
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The Small Poppies’ promotional material says they are from Canberra, but their show has detail and video that suggests they must know Melbourne pretty well. An opening sketch poking fun at faddish urbanites staking out milk-crates successfully mimics the inner-city scenester scene, and is a preview of the terrific flexibility of the actors. I only registered when they took their bows that there were only three of them. Adam Brodie-McKenzie in particular effectively inhabited many different characters, but Caitlin Croucher and Andrew Nichols also deftly shifted styles.
As the last …
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“Do you want any choof?” asks a pale man in waterproof jacket and striped shirt as he walks down Swanston Street. A lot can amuse when walking Melbourne’s streets and keeping your eyes and ears open to what’s around you. Al Pitcher has taken this idea and run with it, camera in hand. His show is the self-confessed equivalent to your mate showing you holiday pics, except his holiday is in the streets of Melbourne and occurred on the day of the gig. It is the ‘mate’ aspect of …
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Travers Purton wrote about the new Festival Club format last week and I had the happy role of seeing the second weekend‘s headline act, Al Madrigal. Al is from San Francisco and has featured on US late shows like Jimmy Kemmel Live. The Festival Club setting is perfect for him as he spoke about his young ‘interracial’ family in the familiar American sardonic style, touching on subjects ranging from The Wiggles to Mexican strippers. There was heart behind it too (as you’d hope when someone is talking family) and his …
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A bump n’ grind bassline signals the start of a Britney Spears medley and everyone is unsure whether to laugh. The inaugural Keep Your Skirt On is a comedy night, but most of the crowd secretly loves a bit of Britney and no amount of ironic smiling could hide it. The tribute trio Toxic was the first of fourteen acts on a successful night brought to us by the Skirt Network and hosted by the devilish and dashing Celia Pacquola and Oliver Clark.
Remember the Andrews Sisters? No? The Curly Wurly …
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The crowd hugged the edges of the club, hesitant to sit in the light looking at the empty stage. Appropriately for a show titled Be My Friend, Mark Trenwith reacted, bringing the audience in one by one like a slow embrace of the bare seats up front. This is a friendly, inventive show which soon picked up the pace as Mark enthusiastically launched into his material, in between introducing filmed segments on the video screen.
On this media night there were technical difficulties, but true to form Mark introduced the audience …
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Just down from the town hall, near the corner of Little Collins and Elizabeth Streets, is Club F4. Normally a nightclub space reserved for young revellers, this comedy festival it’s hosting some lesser-known names testing out some fresh material.
Jaymie Wilson opens the triple bill with stories of America and getting drunk young, giving the tales his own enthusiastic departures and observations. He works the crowd and his microphone technique well and is a boisterous warm-up for the crowd.
Wilson is followed by Magesh, who you might have seen on Channel 10’s …
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A few pages over on The Pun, Ben McKenzie has been writing a regular segment on Geek Comedy. He has described a set of criteria for this increasingly-used classification, but I will still have to defer to his judgement on how young Kale Bogdanovs, from Canberra, fits in. Bogdanovs starts off his performance familiarly enough with some self-deprecating jokes, but soon he is digging through the detail of the Bible, Dr Dre’s The Chronic and Enid Blyton books with a passionate analysis which often bubbles into anger. This is not …
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Recently I saw Karl Chandler, who very conveniently gave out Christmas crackers at the end of his show, giving me chocolate and also an easy metaphoric angle for the review. This candy-and-creativity-for-comment was a sweet deal and guaranteed Karl would get a good review. Therefore, unfortunately, I have to give Occupation: Ugly a bad review.
No, just kidding. Occupation: Ugly is the inaugural production of Comedicate, a young group with high hopes of making RMIT’s Kaleide Theatre a place-to-be during the Comedy Festival. This squadron of seven comics and a producer …
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