Travers Purton
The Pun, The Pun 2009, The Pun 2009 Reviews »
Adam Rozenbachs is here to make you laugh. He’s not concerned with a comedy festival ‘theme’ show, just an A-Grade quality stand-up. Singledumb, a word describing the state of being single and not knowing why, is the bare bones constructed for Rozenbachs to riff around.
Opening his show with some timely and well-observed topical jokes from the day’s headlines, Rozenbachs spends the following ten minutes showing off his improvisational comedy chops by chatting to the audience. He is an outstanding ad-libber, rapidly retorting with jokes for the various professions of crowd …
The Pun, The Pun 2009, The Pun 2009 Reviews »
The Festival Club is a must attend venue during the MICF. Late-night and boozy, it is a proper comedy club. On any given night you will be offered a cornucopia of international and local comics, treading the boards and plying you with their snappiest material in bite size chunks. On weekends throughout the festival, the Club also features an early opening international headliner, this week’s was American Kevin Brennan.
Brennan is a solid gold, professional comedian, right down to the suit he takes to the stage in. Assuming the roll of …
The Pun, The Pun 2009, The Pun 2009 Reviews, The Pundit »
Tale of Two Cities is a misleading title for this show – you read it and think ‘Great, that REALLY sounds like a show I want to see! A show full of Sydney and Melbourne jokes.’ It isn’t like that at all. It is Moore’s own story – of a Sydney boy who moved to Melbourne and still is trying to make sense of his decision.
Moore is an extremely likeable, engaging performer; onstage he operates effortlessly without a microphone. Opening the show with self-deprecating style at the expense of …
The Pun, The Pun 2009, The Pun 2009 Reviews »
Charlie Pickering is not so much a stand-up comedian as a gifted raconteur. The subject of this evening’s recitation is Frank, Pickering’s grandfather. Narrating through a potted family history, personal anecdotes and seedy asides, he paints a loving portrait of Frank, whilst simultaneously basking in every opportunity to sketch a disparagingly black picture of his own exploits.
The Audacity of Frank has been scripted and directed to within an inch of its life, leaving a finely tuned machine of laughter. Such analytical precision has left little room for improvisation, which is …
The Pun, The Pun 2009, The Pun 2009 Reviews »
Wilson Dixon: country singer, cowboy philosopher and Cripple Creek’s favourite son. A man of the road, Dixon is on tour again, singing songs from his first album, Wilson Dixon’s Greatest Hits, and his much acclaimed second album, Introducing Wilson Dixon. Living life by simple truths and homespun wisdom, Dixon is at a loss when his wife leaves. Best head for the hills, he thinks, and see if Uncle Cletus has any sage advice.
Alter ego of New Zealander Jesse Griffin, who has shone at past MICFs as one third of the …
The Pun, The Pun 2009, The Pun 2009 Reviews »
The room at Three Degrees is a tough place for a comedian. It’s not the crowd, who were primed to laugh, but the space itself. Stuck at the back of the venue, the room is awfully lit with only a single spotlight trained on the stage – a look that suggests police line-up rather than stand-up. With four of Tasmania’s best and brightest comics waiting in the wings ready to take to the poorly lit stage, I hoped they were up to the challenge. They were. Thanks to a well …
The Pun, The Pun 2009, The Pun 2009 Reviews »
Josh Earl is XXVII is a lo-fi comedy spectacular. The self-proclaimed ‘gentle comedian’ enters amid his own hand drawn hyperbole with a persona mixed of equal parts bashful indie-boy and stand-up comic arrogance. Josh has just turned 27 and doesn’t know if he is a boy or a man. Ultimately he is afraid to find that all the signs may point to boy.
Taking pointers on what it takes to be an adult from a seven year-old girl, Earl has hashed out an ideal framework to hang his show on. Diverging …
The Pun, The Pun 2009, The Pun 2009 Reviews, The Pundit 2006 »
In his one-man stand-up show about a substandard stand-up comedian, Damian Callinan has invented the saddest, least funny comic to ever try out for Raw Comedy – and that really is saying something. Is This Thing On?: The Dave Berry Story has to be the most meta stand-up you will ever see. Dave Berry isn’t funny, but he tries, he tries so very hard. He tries using props, he tries observational humour, and even puts on weight so he can tell fat jokes. Till one day, when the world …
The Pun, The Pun 2009, The Pun 2009 Reviews »
Des Bishop is a big deal in his advertised homeland of Ireland and Saturday night at the Hi-Fi Bar he had the crowd in to prove it. A room full of drunken Irish, happy to fulfil the stereotype and to be lovingly made fun of. This setting made it all the more jarring when Bishop opened his mouth and set free in an American accent. Bishop grew-up in New York and was sent off to school in Ireland at age 14 having been expelled for alcohol related problems. What was …
The Pun, The Pun 2009, The Pun 2009 Reviews »
A Stitch in Time is a curious little show, offering a brief history of fashion, told with hyper-kinetic enthusiasm by narrators Kat Chish and Jane Flanagan. Starting at the toga and working up to the present day, there is plenty of material to mine for comic effect.It’s a bedroom address of dress; a sermon in style. But the result is somewhat hit and miss. Hemlines go up and down, and so do the punch lines. There is some comedy gold within the fashion victims; the similarities between Lycra and thalidomide …
The Pun, The Pun 2009, The Pun 2009 Reviews »
Dave Bushell is a manic little red ball of energy, a collapsed comedy star gone supernova, like the love child of Dylan Moran and a ginger Tasmanian devil. Let the Kid Go is an errant vehicle for Bushell to drive along the tumultuous streets of his mind like a third world tour bus operator. He is a man on a mission to ‘embrace life’ and if he can’t embrace it he will at the very least grab life by the ears and lick its’ face.
Working twin narratives of living a …
The Pun, The Pun 2009, The Pun 2009 Reviews »
Richard McKenzie is a great big scary-looking man who, it turns out, is lovely. And so is his show. A Sting in the Tale is a tribute to Richard’s father who died during last years comedy festival, which doesn’t sound like a funny start to a show but if you give Richard the time, he will give you the comedy.
Tales of Richard’s father serve as a jumping off point for digressions and asides, taking the audience from the trenches of World War One to back stage at a U2 concert …
The Pun, The Pun 2009, The Pun 2009 Reviews »
Storytellers’ Club bills itself as a place for people who like stories but it really is much more than that. It is the Whitman’s sampler of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, a handy cheat sheet of comics. Can’t decide who to see this year? Stick your head in to the club and you will be treated to a fireside get-together that keeps you grinning.
The nature of the setup, comics telling stories along a set theme is its strongest selling point, much credit to the clubs creator, Sarah Bennetto. Because of …
The Pun, The Pun 2007, The Pun 2007 Reviews »
Billed as ‘Australia’s first lady of comedy’, Fiona O’Loughlin, much as it pains me to kowtow to such statements, did not disappoint. The mother of five and wife to one from Alice Springs has built up quite a following in Melbourne over five years of festival shows and television appearances. A show of hands from the audience revealed a majority of first-time attendees, resulting in a recap of her life to get the crowd up to speed.
Fiona’s material is based on what she portrays as a careless disregard for the …
The Pun, The Pun 2006, The Pun 2006 Reviews »
Rich Hall, best know for his caustic stand-up, including his character Otis Lee Crenshaw, has turned his hand to theatre. Set in a West Texas radio station, Levelland is an hour or so in the life of talk radio jock Wayman (Hall). He is loud, opinionated and knows he is always right, cutting off or cutting down his callers with relish. The price of gas (petrol) has hit 10 dollars, and a stranger, Scrope (Nathaniel Davis), has come in search of him.
Tackling themes of religion, politics and the oil crisis, …
The Pun, The Pun 2006, The Pun 2006 Reviews »
Dizney on Dry Ice is a cartoonish slapstick mafia spoof that doesn’t hit its mark. A few shows have been running long at this year’s Comedy Festival, but this show is just too long. And that is its major flaw: the script. It needs a lot of work. Some of the set ups to jokes are so long the audience are at the punchline before the performers, and other running jokes outstay their short welcome.
The show is based on a very good central idea, taking a hostage that isn’t alive, …
Loading ...
|