To anyone who has ever ’solved’ a Rubik’s cube by peeling off the stickers and rearranging them, go to Lawrence Leung’s show The Marvellous Misadventures of Puzzle Boy. Lawrence has spent the last 20 years trying to learn the secret behind solving the iconic 80s puzzle toy. “There are hundreds of different methods, but they all require a lot of memory and pattern recognition, and the most important thing is patience,” he says. So has he cracked it?
You’ll have to see the show to find out. Puzzle Boy covers autobiographical …

Question: what if Australia’s pre-eminent political comedian, described by The Age as ‘a living Melbourne treasure’, were charged as a terrorist? It could happen. Last week Rod Quantock hosted The Inaugural Golden Guy Fawkes Award, in which local and international comedians competed for the ‘Comedian Most Likely to Blow-Up Parliament’ Award. Quantock was expecting some very special visitors to the event, held at The Old Melbourne Gaol.
‘I sent invitations to ASIO and the Chief of Police,’ he says. But how would we know if they were in the audience? ‘They’re …

How is your Festival going?
Good. I’m enjoying myself but I’m getting a bit tired, as I’m sure all comedians are, at this point.
I’ve checked out your schedule and it seems like you’re doing pretty much every night?
Yeah. I’m working full-time as well.
Are you a masochist?
Yeah I am actually. So I’m basically trying to do a little bit too much at the moment I think.
You work as a teacher I believe?
Yeah. I do. Pretty much everything I do requires my voice.
Wouldn’t it be easier to write everything up on the board …

Since its inception in 2001, The Crew has performed over two-hundred shows, seen its members proceed to successful performing careers and in the process established itself as the longest running and most successful weekly improv show in Australia.
But this is hardly the time to get lazy.
‘We’ve spent the majority of the last four years doing short-form, which is often described as ‘jumping through hoops for the audience’,’ says Rob Lloyd, The Crew’s Artistic Director. ‘Then late last year we decided to use 2005 to explore new and challenging forms of …

If you’re into musical comedy, you’re gonna love this one. 90 members of the Melbourne Youth Orchestra pack the Melbourne Town Hall to perform alongside comedians including Scared Weird Little Guys, Russell Fletcher as Danny Kaye, Genevieve Clifford and Nicholas Buc. According to Dhari Vij, who plays double bass in the orchestra, it’s an experience they’re unsure how to handle. ‘Our rehearsals are made up of comedians cracking jokes.’
Ranging from Mozart to John Williams, Score Reloaded is basically a war on music, performed live on stage in front of hundreds. …

While you’re watching Andrew McClelland up on stage, you might recognise him from his stints on radio, in the DJ booth or cutting sick on the dance floor. For this fervent comedian, all these passions combine into an inspiring Comedy Festival show.
He loves music. That seems to be the basis for the Comedy Festival show Andrew McClelland’s Mix Tape. No philosophical meaning, no in-depth analysis or long-winded story about a bad experience with a tape deck. It’s a refreshing thought; McClelland is just passionate about his music, and wanted to …

Michael Chamberlin is taking on God with his show Michael Chamberlin and the Ten Commandments for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival this year. Not content with the oldest rules in the religious book, Chamberlin is convinced that they need some updating to make it in the modern world.
While others may do shows for the Festival based on climbing metaphoric or literal mountains, Chamberlin keeps close to his Catholic upbringing ‘I’ve never been trapped in the bush or contracted some exotic disease,’ he explains, ‘this was what I dealt with growing …

Tripod have long been festival favourites. For years they have been a show punters are happy to shell out hard earned money for, knowing full well that they were guaranteed to laugh their way through an hour. Somehow combining a steady, reliable show with ever-changing material which always never feels stale. This year they return to a cabaret style, an hour of songs and banter which only has one theme: funny.
Scod will take to the stage each night to sing up a storm with Yon and Gatesy, …

When comedian Cal Wilson moved to Melbourne the thing that struck her about the city was not the erratic weather or the abundance of black clothing, but rather, our peculiar fondness for Australian Rules football. ‘The thing I found really funny when I first got here is that everyone said, ‘Oh you’ve got to choose a team,” the Melbourne International Comedy Festival veteran tells. ‘Even if you don’t really like footy, you’ve still got a team you barrack for ’cause it saves time.’
Two years later, the New Zealand-grown TV regular …

According to Penny Tangey, the title Kathy Smith Goes to Maths Camp is ‘a pretty accurate description’ of her show. In it, Penny plays Kathy Smith, a 15-year-old science and maths enthusiast. ‘A lot of the kids at Kathy’s school don’t like maths and science,’ explains Penny. ‘Being at maths camp is the first time that she has been in the majority.’ The show is about being a teenager, about the excitement of ‘first times’ and the burden of ‘insecurities’. ‘At camp, Kathy is excited to find some kids …

Courteney Hocking fell in love with a boy who was an inventor. What’s a girl to do? Apparently read up on all things inventor-ish and make a comedy festival show all about it.
Hocking was a Victorian Raw Comedy Finalist in 2001, part of Comedy Zone in 2002 and performed her first solo show at Melbourne Fringe Festival 2005. When she set out to write her first hour long solo show, Hocking had clear aims in mind. ‘I wanted to create a show that had a really strong structure, …

You may know his voice from triple j, or you’ve seen him on ‘The Glass house’, but Justin Hamilton is a hard-working comedian, and it’s clearly more than a job to this talented man from South Australia.
From his early days in a duo act called the ‘Bunta Boys’ in Adelaide’s close-knit comedy world, Justin Hamilton has learned the ups and downs of the trade, eventually honing his skills to the self-sustaining position of full-time comic. It’s a luxury that Hamilton finds weird within the Australian scene; every UK comic he …

Michael Camilleri made his directorial debut during the L’Or‚àö?al Melbourne Fashion Festival a few years ago with ‘a weird, arty performance, art fashion parade at a strip club in Brunswick.’ This year, the two-time Melbourne Fringe Festival award winner has turned his hand to opera with an absurd update of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale. The show has been nominated for three Green Room Awards (for Best Director, Best Production and Best Conductor), which is interesting considering that Camilleri has never worked in opera before. ‘They wanted someone to spice things up …

In 2004 comedian Judith Lucy started work in the high-profile breakfast shift on Sydney radio station 2DayFM. By the year’s end she’d been demoted to drivetime and sent back to Melbourne. Six months later, she was sacked. Most people would probably try and put such a painful experience behind them, but not Judith. She’s turned the whole affair into a comedy show, which suggests that she’s either extremely resilient or one hell of a tough cookie.
‘Either that or I’m an idiot with no imagination,’ she opines drolly, ‘who always has …

What the hell is a Barry? It’s the award given to the best show of the Festival each year, named as such in honor of the first patron of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Barry Humphries.
This year, the nominees are;
Daniel Kitson
If you don’t know who he is then we don’t think you really care about this article. He’s nominated, and if you’ve seen him before you will know why.
Tim Minchin
After the Best Newcomer Perrier in Edinburgh, Minchin has returned to the Melbourne International Comedy Festival with a killer show …

Hello everyone!
Three weeks in, three issues of The Pun and time for some disagreement! It is time to throw a bone amongst the dogs and watch everyone tear each other apart as they try to be the King Bitch of the litter. But who amongst us would ever dare such a thing? Why I, your humble writer of this column, a bon vivant sheep wrangler with an axe to grind. Feel free to disagree with everything I write, but please have an opinion??preferably your own.
It was with quite a bit …