Happy International Women’s Day!  With only a little over two weeks until Melbourne International Comedy Festival begins, we’re celebrating the ladies of the festival by posting our first Top 5 of the year.  Here are our Top 5 shows featuring talented women in 2010, in no particular order.
Keep Your Skirt On
Yes, yes, we’re biased.  We awarded the inaugural Keep Your Skirt On show of 2009 our Professional Development Award.  Their first year was a veritable treasure-trove of talented women, and it’s shaping up to be just as impressive this year.  …

It’s time to get your laugh muscles in training.  Melbourne International Comedy Festival is heading our way again.  In a matter of months Melbourne will be transformed into a Mecca of comedy, and we’re back for another year to guide you through the madness.
The festival website is up and running, ready for you to check out your favourite performers and search for some new talent.  Take a look, start to plan your comedy schedule and buy your tickets before you miss out!  In the meantime, we’ll be keeping an ear …

Are you a budding writer?  Got a passion for live performance?  The Pun is now accepting applications to be a part of our team for 2010.  We’re searching for reviewers, writers and sub-editors to cover the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.  To apply, send your resume and two samples of your writing (including one live performance review) to lefa@anewleaf.com.au by 28 February.

@michaelfink: Pajama Men were ridiculously funny – deserving Barry Award winners, at least on the basis of the three acts I saw at the festival

@rperdio: Harry Potted: slapstick comedy act lampooning eponymous Harry. Enjoyable for the 3-feet & below. Everyone else, enjoy the… yeah. 1.5

Long ago, established comedian Lawrence Mooney came to the realisation that in order for a man to feel comfortable about laughing at something, he first has to look at the woman that he’s with in order to get permission. It’s a subconscious thing, perhaps left over from more chivalrous days, something we don’t even realise that we’re doing. It was at this point that I looked over to my fiance … and she was laughing. I rightly assumed that I had permission to laugh, and I perhaps overused it!
Lawrence Mooney …

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 …

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 …

@Dan_0: saw the boy with tape on his face at trades last night – brilliantly hilarious show!

@johnsyweb: I ache after laughing at #JasonByrne at #MICF. Jeez that man is funny! Great, great show! Paticularly loved the observations of Australians.

@rperdio: Adam Rozenbach: classic stand-up with a loosely-structured narrative on being single proves funny enough but also weak in parts. 2.5

@snarkle: The MICF museum tour was great fun. I went on Thurs.. there were just a few too many schoolkids tho

Charlie Pickering talks about his past in comedy and his new show, The Audacity of Frank, with The Pun’s Matt Smith

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 …

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 …

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 …