This is history like you wish they’d taught it at high school. Charlie Ranger and Nicholas Waxman have done the research and tell the story of the disastrous south/north continental expedition with great gusto. The amazing facts come out while the terrifying ineptitude of most concerned is exposed and ridiculed.

The two men play multiple parts, switching at the end of a sentence from one (sometimes quite dubious) accent to another. I loved the pantomime moment when ‘Burke,’ who is momentarily playing someone else, tells his off-sider (who is never ‘Burke’) to “Bring me Burke!”

The silence and double-take are comedy gold as the audience gradually realise it can’t be done. ‘Burke’ is already there, but he ain’t ‘Burke’ at that moment.

‘I can get you King, I can get you Becker; I can’t get you Burke,’ says the off-sider.

The script is brilliant, the constantly changing vignettes are seamless, the characters are excellent, some of the accents are almost believable and the camels keep talking as they masticate. And, in a Comedy Festival first, no four letter words were deemed necessary to the making of an hour of intelligent humour.

Relative newcomers, Ranger and Waxman are a great addition to the comedy scene with a tale and presentation unlike anything else in the Festival. The future is very bright for this duo even if our heroes of the past, as they portray them, are anything but!

It all started in high school and now he’s invited to his ten year reunion. Should he return and face his demons; the boys who made his life a nightmare and the girls he lusted for but never dared approach?

He tells stories of his humiliations, and he certainly has some horrendous tales to tell. He was disarmingly honest and some of the reminiscences are so sad, so pathetic in the true sense of the word, that rather than laugh I just felt sorry for the kid he used to be.

He had buck teeth, glasses and some cruel nicknames back then and was so low in the schoolyard pecking order that he was bullied by the bullied. He nearly took his fingers off perving and fantasising during woodwork and his only school romance – a promising affair with an internet girlfriend – took a shattering turn for the worse. His bonding with Dad came to a bad end and it’s taken him a long time to get over it all.

So, is he ready for the reunion or not? Can he return to the corridors of hell, punch his nemesis on the nose and ride off with sweet Kathy?

Trot along to the Fad Gallery and find out. It’s one of the more exotic venues and Man Up! keeps you guessing. You’ll laugh at his chirpier lines and feel for him during the bleaker ones, but life’s on the way up now – just like Walker’s comedy career.

You only have to hear her play a few bars to know she has keyboard skills; I read somewhere that she’s classically trained. I believe it.

She accompanies herself through several songs of unfulfilling romance in the city office where she ‘daylights’ waiting for the big break. She told us about sad, vertically-challenged George and his vain search for love and how she needs ‘more champagne on Friday nights,’ . She sings a sweet lullaby: ‘please don’t grow up to be a dirty teenager’ and sends a very emotional Dear John which causes her to lose composure momentarily.

She’s in the David O’Doherty/Tim Minchin category but, while her keyboard, vocals (and make-up!) match, she lacks the whimsy of the former and the edge of the latter. She needs lyrics with a bit more bite to complete a very good all-round package.

At a mere $12 a ticket, she may be the cheapest show in town. This year her brief stint is worth the money but I look forward to the time she can fill the full hour with smart, tight satirical lyrics and can dispense with the 20 minute warm-up man with his shtick on turds in sinks, cock and balls drawings, sex with robots and the dreaded C word.

Sophie’s head and shoulders above that and, with a bit of polishing, should command a spot in the thick of it next time round.

Mr. Punch was his traditional wicked self, fulfilling puppeteer Ken Harper’s warning to his over-excited audience that there’d be ‘lots of whacking.’ What fun it was as the rascally rogue bounced the baby down the stairs and whacked a succession of law-abiding citizens to oblivion. He copped a few himself despite the horde of juniors screaming ‘He’s behind you!’

The kids were encouraged to be part of the mayhem and they took up the invitation with great enthusiasm and remarkable lung power. If the kid next to me (not my perfectly behaved mate, of course) squealed ‘Feed the baby,’ once, he squealed it 50 times in ever-increasing volume.

There was violence and bad language – stolen ‘squashages’ which the crocodile ate and a Police ‘Ossifer’ trying to make arrests. This was R-rated stuff!

When it was all over and everyone lived, or died, happily ever after, Ken Harper, a drama teacher when he’s not up to his elbows in puppets, invited everyone ‘backstage’ for a close-up of the puppeteer’s 400 year old craft. It was a little bit educational and a whole heap of fun. I laughed more at Ken’s work than I have at many ‘adult’ shows – but maybe that says something about me!

My little bloke said he enjoyed it a lot too, especially the ‘whacking.’
I said, ‘Oh no, you didn’t!’
He said ‘OH YES I DID!’ – loudly!

I went along to his forced stand-up gig – well, that’s what I thought he said – turns out to be his first gig. His wife of five weeks is a Norse, too; nah, she’s not from Sweden – works in a hospital.

‘Annyway,’ as he pronounces it, he’s a friendly, energetic bloke from Dublin living in New Zealand. His style is Jason Byrne-delivery and level of excitement – fast and frantic.

He works hard, perspires and chunters on. He greets Irish friends and talks about his impoverished childhood – is there an Irishman anywhere who wasn’t brought up 12 to a bed, eating lumps of coal found on the street?

His overheads are funny and he could have used more of them to back up erratic yarns. He was nearly taken away by the gypsies as a baby and head-butted his granny saying his Irish farewells; he’s that sort of guy.

His best stuff came early on – second hand Christmas presents, fear of spiders and photoshopping grandpa’s travel pictures making him pop up all over the world.

The material slipped downhill from there a bit – embarrassing bodies, hospital horrors and old people’s rectums hanging out ain’t really funny, but, hey, the bloke’s starting out and needs to be encouraged.

He only did four nights and they’re gone so this review doesn’t count for much this year. He can take his ‘forced’ gig away now, polish it up and come back next year with a four start review instead of a two and a bit.

And if it’s at the LOOP Bar, get along. It’s got the comfiest couch seating of any Festival venue I’ve ever been to. Every gig should be so kind to your bum!

There to witness Andrew O’Neill, vegan, transvestite, H.M. comedian. Not my usual fare; seat near the door to facilitate an early exit if required!

But life springs its surprises. O’Neill is a personable young man notwithstanding his tatts, red lippy, frilly miniskirt and ‘beautiful head of hair’ as my old mum might say. As an ‘alpha male shout generator,’ he’s more than qualified to present Transvestism 101.

The patter was clever and original. He riffed on the differences within genders, not between them, and he’s a slightly nervous atheist somewhat apprehensive of the wrath of god. Particularly if the god turns out to be Odin, who’s really fearsome and vengeful compared to the forgiving Jesus.

There’s quite a bit of Jesus in the show. Don’t take your Pentecostal mother-in-law; she might be surprised to find the son of God was a rhyming slang cockney – like O’Neill himself – before they put him up ‘on the Jonathon Ross.’

There are some clever non sequiturs in West Country accents, a head-ache inducing cross-eyed story and an evident dislike of the British upper classes. He left you wondering whether he really did throw a much-admired and bewildered member of the Royal family out of his cab.

I liked the boy; he’s got a future. He’s different, intelligent and his show is a very competently compiled package. See him at the Pony this year before he moves on to better things next year.

This experience and expertise is on display in his stand-up routine at the Athenaeum. His manner is brisk and the words tumble out in a waterfall of clever verbosity: I never expected to hear “ingenuous”, “mendacious” and “joie de vivre” in quick succession at the Comedy Festival!

He had some well-researched local gags – played off Gosford and Perth against “latte-drinking, book-reading, outside-sitting, cigarette-smoking Melbourne”. They’re not his exact words, but that’s the manner of his rapid, sure-footed delivery.

He’s caustic, even bitter, and at his best when skewering the pompous, inflated and over-rated. Oprah and her “moronic” friend cop a serve, he apologises for Dr Phil (while doing an excellent impersonation), and destroys country and western music with perfect “did done me wrong” patois.

He showed his improvisational skills portraying neanderthal man discovering a dubious use for his opposable thumbs, doing funny Aussie, French and Italian accents and riffing to the stage manager suddenly spotted in the wings.

His “Paul McCartney and the one-legged girl routine” were mercilessly funny and drew little gasps of horror which Proops enjoyed as he ploughed remorselessly on.

Maybe some of the American political lines didn’t quite fire and perhaps we’d heard the koala “bear” stuff before – Proops made a note, literally, of lines that missed the target – but the pace was relentless, the mannerisms exquisite, the delivery ever-fluent and the content largely relevant and cutting.

If you want to see – and laugh at – a consummate comedy professional at work, go and see Greg Proops.

It’s certainly attracting the punters. About 90 of us turned up, were divided into three groups and rotated around three guides: Stella Young, Ben McKenzie and ‘Sam’ a ‘six year old’ played with squeaky voice and pigtails by Kate McClelland.

Each guide had an area of expertise in the Museum and pointed out items of interest such as Stella’s Argentian duck (complete with gargantuan penis) and his mate with a unique defence mechanism, or a display of Emperor penguins which led to two ‘volunteers’ making penguin mating noises at each other. Not very funny but the dubious highlight of the segment.

Ben McKenzie (who was channeling Graeme Garden of The Goodies rather well – complete with green velvet jacket and long, ginger mutton chops) was passionate about early life forms. He seemed well-informed and made comparisons between the fake latin names of trilobite species and Harry Potter spells. Ben also had a few gently amusing political asides.

Six year old Sam appropriately took us through the children’s section. She was energetic and possibly a ‘difficult child’ but her patter really failed to generate any genuine mirth.

And that probably sums it up; the show as a whole creates very few laughs. The script is weak; we’re told many interesting facts but its supposed to be comedy not an educational tour.

That said, enough people turned up to show that there is an appetite for something other than regulation stand-up and funny musical routines. Melbourne Museum Comedy Tour attempts to fill the niche but, while it emphasises how ‘cool’ the museum is, it fails to discover how funny it could be.

In Has No Answers, Little just tells stories. There’s the barest of props, just a large photo on an easel which he uses in the build-up to his clever and original finale. There’s no theme to the show, just yarns and one-liners about his life. Little has a friendly persona and a great stage manner, despite the inevitable twerp in the front row who thinks the show is about him.

Little covers some random stuff, including self-checkouts at supermarkets, wanting to be a gangster but enjoying a good cup of tea, chinese restaurants, going to Thailand, gay women adopting kids, using the disabled toilet and speed dating. It’s all over the place but completely under control, with some particular highlights: I loved Tommy’s longer stories about his crush on Natalie, pretending to be a car at Macca’s drive thru and a slightly creepy Facebook friend.

Little’s comedy is up there with the likes of Carl Barron and Stephen K. Amos for my money (and a lot cheaper!). He’s Little for now but he’s going to be large. And jeez, he made me laugh!

She opens with ‘Bless me Father for I have sinned’ and sets up the show for 32 years of guilt and confession. It’s not heavy though; Edmond is as chirpy as a cricket and relishes her smoking at 8, her drunken ejection from the MCG at 16, the McHappy Day that she transformed into a grounded-at-19 day and her altogether justifiable-on-reflction dismissal from ‘an unnamed chain selling predominantly pancakes from a parlour.’

There’s a song for every story and her able accompanist, Amy Bennett, joins in duet, vamps in the pauses and enjoys the show as much as the rest of us. We meet Edmond’s mum and her one-foot-in-the-grave next door neighbours. Despite their age and decrepitude, they don’t get much sympathy from Edmonds.

She gives you the full body treatment, does Edmonds. She uses her expressively wicked face and her ‘twitchibg crotch’ as a previous night’s heckler apparently called it, to fascinating effect. She’s the hip-swinging, gyrating, pelvic-thrusting, young woman with the dancing banjo –  and good on her!

It was a  lot of fun; a well-constructed show with good songs and stories devoid of the Comedy Festival’s ubiquitous and gratuitous swearing, from a cheeky and engaging comedian. Check her out; she’s a lot funnier than many of the other female performers with bigger profiles around town.

The comfy, ugg-booted Conaty is a hoot too – an effervescent performer with an Irish heritage (80 first cousins!) and a Londoner’s way of expressing “fings.” It’s highly probable that she’s kissed the Blarney Stone to gain its famed verbosity, as she rattles on in an avalanche of cheerfulness and bonhommie. She snorts with laughter recalling her many jobs, her life with Nan (complete with great accents), her lack of relationships and her problems with the new social media. Her cautionary musings on the excesses of Facebook and Twitter are full of good sense couched in comedy terms.

Two kids on a bus called her “fat and goofy;” she’s neither of those. She describes herself as “loud and mental” and that’s closer to the truth. Add  to that: likeable, energetic, clever and perceptive. She’s pondering her invitation to talk about her “success” to the graduates of her old convent school: Conaty is pretty sure she hasn’t had any to speak of!

Roisin Conaty isn’t “piss-your-pants” funny but its a very entertaining hour of good-natured and fluent stand-up.  See her this year before her alter ego, Jackie Hump, takes over.

Muiznieks’ show is built around a political lecture about the class struggle. She has a boardful of cartoons outlining the problems of the world. It may sound a bit ‘Rod Quantock’ but it certainly isn’t. It’s not even a tirade really – it’s an excuse for the songs which are the strength of the show.

Her band (Roland on piano and Emma the multi-instrumentalist) plays the overture till Karin, in gold lame shawl, busts in singing an opener which she promptly pronounces ‘a shit song anyway.’ She’s got bigger things in mind; she’s here to change the world because to parody Randy Newman – and she does – It’s Lousy at the Bottom.

Karin’s songs are great: wicked, witty, tight and tuneful, covering a variety of genres and topics. Her piece d’amusement is her musical reminiscence of a jealous girlfriend who thinks Karin has pinched her lover. She switches from shrew to innocent with a flick of her head scarf to tell both sides of the story. The punchline is a killer!

And I loved the grisly – should that be ‘gristly? – Cannibal Waltz; Hannibal, eat your heart out! The final song may have disappointed a little when the big finish was required but Karin Muiznieks, singer, songwriter, cabaret performer, has a bright future.

I saw Casey Benetto in an early outing, long before Keating! and Comedy Festival canonization, in a show full of promise, intelligence and talent. First Against the Wall has shades of that – Karin is a fine young performer on the verge of big things.

Take Poet Laureate Telia Nevile for example. Nevile, tall and slim, at first glance seems too timid to impress, but she takes the stage, draws a deep breath and plunges into a slide show accompanied by a celebration of words, exquisite turns of phrase and wistful and ironic poetry. In only the second night of her first full-length solo Festival show, she was in full command of her material, her meagre props and the controls of her projector. Not all the comedians I’ve seen this year could claim that!

Her illustrated journey round the world – about 20 well chosen slides – is merely the backdrop to the poetic journey of the heart she pours out in her verses. She describes her odyssey as ‘an epic freefall of discovery held together with the divine glue of poetry.’ There’s a sentence you’re not going to hear in a Wil Anderson rant or a Felicity Ward ramble!

The poems are delightful, from teenage angst ‘Blue Light, Green Romance,’ to bittersweet love songs and a safari which needed audience participation after the absence of a drummer – Nevile tells us in another felicitous phrase – ‘left her percussively bereft.’ It was a charming, short program (only 35 minutes) of clever and perceptive spoken word. It’s not for the boozy, Hughesy set but it’s so refreshingly and winsomely different it could well be an early contender for a Best Newcomer award.

Pestell wins his audience with wit and warmth from the beginning, opening enthusiastically, if somewhat predictably, with some Adelaide (his home town) versus Melbourne material. ‘You’ve got the Grand Prix, we’ve got the panda.’ Hey, Jason, here in the big city, we don’t care!

He riffs on – a bit of Twitter patter tuning in to amusing police force tweets – ‘Just booked a 70 year old hoon – he’s older but not wiser’ – Winter Olympics, Jim’s Mowing franchises, Virgin Airlines, juice bar wars and movies. He tells stories from his personal life; his misfortunes with a staple gun, his father’s fascination with his GPS and his own ill-fated attempt to be a monkey-bar leaping legend in Primary School. Pestell doesn’t loiter long anywhere, bounds from topic to topic, spraying one-liners and puns all over the place.

He draws laughs with material drawn from his teaching career, linking most of it tenuously to his ‘jump the shark’ theme. Pestell admits he didn’t understand the phrase when he chose it, just thought it would make a good title. Anyway, the big fish leans nonchalantly in the back corner awaiting the sensational climax. Will he or won’t he? It doesn’t really matter, anyway, as by then the audience is well onside.

This is a good young comedian with some quirky thoughts and an engaging personality; go and see him on the way up.

The boys have plenty of smarts alright but nothing very casual. It’s a well-structured hour of clever dialogue, and short nonsense songs with acoustic guitar and taped interludes from the mother they share (mother generally comes to gigs but can’t make it tonight). She sends her instructions and a surprise message anyway. There’s a hint of angst on stage – the boys compete over whose Dad is the braver, handsomer and stronger. Roger mostly keeps it all bottled up behind terse retorts and shaded eyes; Fletcher is more likely to let his feelings sneak out. The lads are as alike as Twins Schwarzenegger and De Vito; they describe each other as ‘a string bean pin-head and a pumpkin-headed sofa!’ Fortunately, when feelings run too high they just break into another song.

But hush! The fathers, unsighted since birth, are due to turn up at this very gig. There will be tears and joyous reunions – the Acacia Room will be awash with unfettered emotion. The songs go on as we hold our breath – cabaret, vaudeville, jazz, silly dancing and that greedy seagull, Gavin McKenzie. Eventually the love-child of Jennifer Hawkins and Stephen Hawkings turns up but where are Daddies One and Two?

How will it all end? Well, too soon actually. If you’re looking for something right out of the ordinary, intelligent musical comedy with twists galore, this bit of Smart Casual will fit you like an Armani suit.

Dead Cat Bounce is a band of four Irish guys – a ‘rock god’ on lead, perhaps Jason Byrnes’ ginger brother in leopard skin pants on drums, a talented leprechaun on keyboard and a gnarly, hairy bass player who sighs repeatedly that ‘music is his mistress.’  The boys play better than most, sing great harmonies, strut, preen, punch the air and pretend to be the real thing; it’s easy to think they could have been if they hadn’t seen the funny side of it all.

The songs are imaginative and eclectic and the lyrics quite alarming – running kids over in the playground, giving your OK girlfriend’s sister the clap and a Wiggly lesson for the littlies – Good Touch, Bad Touch. Their Tom Lehrer-like bleakness is interspersed with the new dance craze ‘sweeping the universe’ ‘Doing the Kick‘ (audience participation required) and their ‘happy’ song about the ‘sunny, summer day we killed that guy!’ What a laugh that was, eh?

They bicker, banter and occasionally reveal their frailties on stage, but it’s all great fun complete with buckets of Irish charm and musicality. Everything from a capella, heavy rock to Westlife and Deep Purple.

The crowd loved them, hooting and shouting, with the girls in the front row adoring them all the while.  You will too.  I can do no more for you than quote Molly, the great pop guru of the ’80s, one more time: ‘Do yourself a favour!’

Things aren’t great at Maison Lorraine.  Custom is dying – most of it in the hairdressing chair – and the skip in the yard soon has more corpses the curlers.  A takeover bid threatens from the glitzy salon across the road when fate takes a hand.

The characters are over the top and wonderful.  Powell lurches from sweetness to violent rage, Hickey’s deadpan performance is matched only by her singing voice and Brennan, dragging himself through two female parts and two male parts, is versatile and funny.  It’s a celebration of silliness and unapologetic over-acting.  It’s a little bit corny and a little bit campy and none the worse for that.  I laughed out loud, as did lots of others in the audience.  Lorraine matches ‘Half-price Brazilians’ across the road with ‘Half-price for Jews’ on her side, while true bogan Jade enjoys a Chiko Roll as she is chased by dogs. ‘Bloody things,’ she complains, ‘Don’t know why they let blind people have them!’

The show will get stronger as it settles in and allows itself more freedom to ad lib and improvise.  Even now, Lorraine’s Face and Hair is a lot of fun. Take yourself along for the full treatment.

Rob Hunter’s portentous and ominous introductory voiceover to Moosecow, about the imminent battle between the two ungulates of the show’s title, has precious little to do with anything that follows. When Rob himself enters, he’s fragile and unassuming. He’s somewhere between bewildered, terrified and eager to please. A persona can only be maintained through confidence and capability.

Hunter tells us about the oddball things he loves and the things he hates. He throws in clever one-liners like the importance of the letter O, without which the Count in Sesame Street would have a whole new audience. He’s interrupted several times by his bearded friend Joel who tries to infuse him with a bit of confidence. Joel is a more than competent sidekick, bringing laughs of his own. He’s the catalyst of the reappearance of the long-forgotten show title but it all goes wrong, of course, and the two literally sign off with an original and funny finale.

The engaging Rob Hunter may be the lesser of the two comedy Hunters in terms of profile at this stage, but he’s on his way up and well worth an hour of anyone’s time.

He starts by talking about language itself and inadequacy of English to express what we’re trying to say. He riffs about US politics and whether, as some pundits claimed, Obama is the realisation of Martin Luther King’s dream. ‘He’s not,’ Hunter says. He claims ‘the system will change the man before the man can change the system.’There are moments of near profundity like that before he plunges back into comedy.

Hunter is rude, crude but strangely inoffensive. Perhaps it’s the deep voice; perhaps it’s the laughing eyes. He gets away with it all. Who else could admit to a slight admiration for Austria’s Josef Fritzl (who kept his daughter under the house) and joke about it?

Hunter explains early on in the show that sometimes he sounds like somebody who reads a lot of books and other times as if he has just left the plantation. He was right; he can philosophise on changing sexual mores, America’s global attitudes and bad parenting as easily as joke about anal sex, masturbation and incest.

It’s a singular hour of comedy, full of dirty stories, food for thought, moments of pathos and gales of laughter. Small wonder Reginald. D. Hunter is packing them in.

The farmers decide to take on the big end of town and finish up having to find three objects, an echidna quill, a turtle shell and Phar Lap’s heart, before the big boss will cancel his railroad plans.

The journey takes them from the farm through the jungle to the bottom of the sea, and gives the personable but dumb cowpokes a chance to sing songs, use whimsical homemade props and create excruciating puns; I’d certainly never made a connection between echidna and e-kid-napping before

It’s a very silly story, which isn’t itself necessarily a criticism.  It meandered zanily all over the place – try connecting a talking ashtray, Daniel Kowalski and a railroad mogul whose head is a full tray of lasagna.  It’s weird and occasionally wonderful.  The women are wholesome and wholehearted with undoubted comedic talent and many surreal ideas but an unpolished script.  It’s a bit Monty Python without the divine brilliance and inspiration.

I really wanted to like it a lot and hoped that the loose ends would tie up somehow.  If they did, I missed it.  Perhaps that was just the final absurdity.

Most of Carroll’s old characters are there. A bewildered Alice was already sitting in the stalls when the audience filed in and was quickly joined by the keyboard playing White Rabbit who backed the songs, played incidental music and intermittently raced around regretting her tardiness. The other two, with an admirable range of corny accents, become birds, caterpillars, mock turtles, Mad Hatters, March Hares, playing cards, an unscary croquet-playing queen and a very cool Cheshire cat, in rapid succession. It’s non-stop movement, character and costume changes. Nothing is wasted – even a sock puppet plays two roles including the King literally on the Queen’s arm.

Alice grows and shrinks, through the aid of clever on-screen graphics, as she unwisely sips magic potions.  The action and the original songs quietened boisterous boys in the bleachers and captivated pre-teen misses on the front row. They laughed and took their chances to participate. Parents and Pops enjoyed the enjoyment of the youngsters almost as much as hearing Carroll’s nonsense verses and word games coming alive onstage.

The Ballroom is a big space and this production of Alice in Wonderland deserves to fill it with the merriment of munchkins and their minders.  As Alice said when she finally woke, ‘It’s a very good game of let’s pretend.’

The group’s fragile stability is threatened further by the introduction of a sweet ingénue from the ABC who has ideals about ‘learning being fun’. The venal stage manager plays one off against the other and threatens they’ll all be replaced by his new group, The Ethnic Polka Dots.
The action is fast and furious, the dancing frenetic, the energy levels rarely below high powered and the swearing prolific.  The show abounds in single entendres; the showstopper, The Big Black Cock and the Littlest Chick, just about says it all.

It’s a high-‘speed’ production, (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) and the denouement comes showered in white powder live in front of the kiddies.  It’s not a show overburdened with subtlety but it’s done with verve and enthusiasm. My laughing gear didn’t get out of second much, however the crowd around me gave it what could be called a ‘wildly enthusiastic reception’.  It was only second night – they may have been all friends and family.

The opening night audience laughed non-stop through his one hour stand-up routine as he reflected on life, asked impertinent questions and did a devastating ‘Where are you from’? routine. Amos’ manner was impudent and disarming – his eyes and observations sparkled.

The show was introduced by Amos’ ‘father’, in traditional African gown, speaking a native language, all wide eyes, chattering teeth and glottal stops. He gesticulates, grins wickedly and cackles like Desmond Tutu. An announcer gave us an unlikely translation of his tirade’very funny indeed.

Amos’ great ear for accents took us around the world. His New Yorkers, surprised South Africans (They thought he was there to sweep the stage.), and redneck Queenslanders were deadly accurate.

Sadly, he reminded us, he never fulfilled his father’s dream of him becoming a lawyer. ‘Yet here I am,’ he said, ‘standing up in front of a roomful of strangers, telling lies!’

‘The roomful’ was in the Council Chambers, and it was the funniest night there since John So announced he was standing for ‘re-erection’. The ornate room is a treasure, but it’s too small for Stephen K Amos. He’ll sell out repeatedly as word of mouth kicks in. He needs a bigger venue, otherwise half of Melbourne will miss out, and that’ll be a pity: he’s premiership material.

Well then, it’s off to The Soubrettes and Friends Variety-a-go-go with you. You’ll find it all there and a bit more!

The Soubrettes, Tania and Alice, dispense songs of love and angst and the whole damn thing. ‘I’m stuck at the party with you,’ they moan. Their rap routine is great – ‘We’re a vegemite sandwich: white, but black on the inside.’

They sing separately too: Tania plaintively, ‘It’s not easy being Greek,’ and Alice, pragmatically, ‘You’re not Mr Right,’ she says, ‘but you’ll do.’

Their talented friends include MCs Steg and Dirk, who plug the gaps between the routines like voluble Spakfilla. They’re sharp and they’re funny.

Princess Sputnik is, ‘How you say eet’?, very beautiful, a graduate of the Vladivostock Institute of Fashion and Astrophysics. She gives some lucky punter a makeover in the interval. Be in it to win it!

And then there’s ‘Princess Blossom’s’ startling reverse strip-tease!

Manchester Lane’s hospitable environment offers food and drink as the cheeky Soubrettes bring the night to an energetic climax! I’ll have what they’re having, thanks!

Soubrettes, friends and variety? Give it a go-go!