Saturday witnessed all manner of mirth and merriment at the penultimate night of this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival club at the HiFi Bar, not the least of which was a pole-dance-off between rapidly-shirtless and Hannah Gadsby. Their performance, an undoubted highlight of the evening, soon segued into the presentation of the festival awards, in a brief ceremony overseen by MC Lehmo.

The winner of the festival’s prestigious Barry Award (named after inaugural patron Barry Humphries) was British comedian Daniel Kitson, for his show It’s the Fireworks Talking. Upon accepting his …

Must. Laugh. At. Funny. Person. Must. Drag. Exhausted. Carcass. To Next Gig. Must. Laugh. HYSTERICALLY. At. Funny. Person…
No, wait a minute, that’s not a funny person, that’s another fucking cashed-up bogan in a pink polo shirt with the fucking collar turned up who’s part of the audience! WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU PEOPLE AND WHY THE HELL DO YOU LINE UP TO LAUGH AT SOME OF THE MOST BLAND, MEDIOCRE, MIDDLE OF THE ROAD SHITE IN THE FESTIVAL?
Woah, Richard, get a grip. Elitist, much?
Ahem. As you can tell, the Comedy …

The end is in sight, ladies and gentlemen. Soon I can return to blogging as usual, instead of obsessively documenting every comedy show I’ve seen in the festival this year. I’m sure some people are reading these reviews and using them as guidelines as to what to see or what not to see. I also know that various comedians are coming here to read what I’ve written about them. Whoever you are, can you leave some goddamn comments please? It’s lonely here with just my hitcounter and me!
This next lot …

I hate the Comedy Festival.
I hate it. I dread it. I fear it.
I like performing, and I like spending a month with my friends from all over Australia and world.
I hate the build up, the writing, the stressing, the doubting. You test it and trial it, but it’s always funny one night, awful the next.
One good thing has come out of the build up to this particular comedy festival is that I have come to realise just how good I am at procrastination.
In fact, I just re-wrote the previous sentence …

I’m not a fan of hackneyed ‘oxford dictionary defines’ introductions to articles and speeches but, in this instance, I think it’s necessary to confess my ignorance, hoping I’m not the only one out there who didn’t know what spruiking was.
Lots of odd images and definitions came to mind: the garnisher of restaurant meals (‘Hey, kitchen-hand! Spruik that plate for service.’), a speciality cleaner or redecorator of some sort (sounds like spruce), kid’s shenanigans (‘You’ve been out spruiking all day, haven’t you?’). And it went on like that.
So, encarta.msn.com defines spruik …

Tragedy, they say, is inherently funny. It’s why some of us (let’s face it, most of us) try desperately, often unsuccessfully, to stifle our guilty chortles at others’ misfortune. Comedic films such as The Royal Tenenbaums and The Squid and the Whale exemplify this exegesis of humour and calamity; although, it arguably gives little explanation for the popularity of ‘Australia’s Funniest Home Videos’.
This analysis of comedy would assert that depressing and confronting fodder such as heartbreak, rejection, family dysfunction and addiction would make a highly successful comedy routine; logically, one …

Alan Brough in Top Town. A one-man show set in Helenville, a small town at risk of being downgraded to a village if anyone else moves away, in which Brough plays every character, from the lady Mayor to the most eccentric of townsfolk. The plot sees Brough roped into making a promotional film for Helenville (which welcomes visitors with a sign reading ‘If you don’t stop, no hard feelings.’), which he ends up releasing on YouTube.
While likeable, and scattered through with some moments of genuinely inventive comedy (such as Brough’s …

Later that night, up the road, down a laneway and upstairs, Mike and I caught Michael Chamberlin’s latest show, a homage to Chamberlin’s lifelong friendships with two mates, Buddha and Bluey. With only about 20-25 people in a venue that could comfortably seat 100, Chamberlin might have struggled. Instead, he proved himself an adroit, engaging and charismatic performer who more than rose to the occasion. While this wasn’t an exceptionally brilliant night of comedy, Chamberlin’s stories of childhood misadventure in the Christmas pagent, inciting a schoolground rebellion over a confiscated …

Gerard McCulloch is Gerard McCulloch sees the affable Melbourne comedian dropping the characters and narrative structures that have informed previous shows such as Uncorked and Gerry of Arabia, returning to the roots of comedy to deliver an hour of somewhat basic stand-up. On Wednesday night, with only seven of us in the audience (not counting the two Auslan interpreters who left after about 15 minutes when it was clear their services weren’t required) the show ran short, and in truth limped across the finish line. Less people means less laughs, …

In another life in the late-80s and 90s, I was a stand-up comedienne. My childhood heroes were the Python team, The Goons, The Goodies and Billy Connolly. I had crushes on them all, except maybe Harry Secombe, probably because I wanted to be them.

It never occurred to me that gender might be an issue until I auditioned for my first university comedy review at Adelaide Uni. The director and everyone else laughed their heads off during my monologue, which if I recall rightly, contained some material about carrots and bottoms (their writing, not mine!).

Imagine my surprise when I was told I wasn’t going to be in the next show because the director thought I was too funny and, as they didn’t write humorous roles for women, I would get bored. He’s since gone on to be a well-known television comic. I’m not going to name him and, of course, I’m not bitter…much. The next year he wasn’t directing the review, I wrote my own skits and joined the team.

The only female comic role model, when I growing up, was Phyllis Diller. With her ‘I’m so ugly I can’t get laid’ routine, she was the ground breaking female comic. This humour wasn’t my cup of tea, and for the first and only time in my life, I really wished I were a guy. I’d thought I could be the seventh member of the Python gang. In fact, that title really belonged to Carole Cleveland who, though very talented, was never acknowledged as a member of the team. She was the straight woman.

After I graduated from drama school in Melbourne, Australia’s comedy capital, in the 80s, comedy was raging. The Last Laugh in Collingwood’s Smith Street was peaking and during every Melbourne International Comedy Festival, the upstairs room known as Le Joke would become La Joke’women-only for two weeks.

It seemed necessary then to give us a break. At most gigs if a woman were included in the line-up, she’d be the only one. It could get a little lonely. It’s not that the guys left you out, but it was definitely more of a ‘rock and roll’ scene.

It was during this early stint with comedy, when I enjoyed some reasonable success, that I heard the term ‘women’s humour’. Like it or not, that phrase had a sense of ‘lesser than’. It generally referred to jokes about relationships, children, the menstrual cycle and so on.

The term ‘men’s humour’ was never heard. Even if you were hysterically funny, you still hadn’t proved yourself worthy unless you got away from these traditionally female topics. The thing is that relationships, children, the menstrual cycle and all that girlie stuff is so much of who we are.

I’m pleased to report that, though still in the minority, the number of female comics has increase since the days of dear old Phyllis. There’s no more La Joke at The Last Laugh, but I can still single out some of the women in this year’s Festival. These performers represent a cross section of the new and the more experienced, the traditional and not so traditional. So laugh please, there’s a lady on stage.

Elegant, vintage, rough at the edges, Trades Hall is a venue worth seeing.
This historic building is a labyrinth of passages and stairwells that wind up, down and around and open out onto ornate, carpeted foyers and trendy warehouse spaces.
Like the advertising material in the dank subways of London’s Underground, posters follow the gradient of the stairs, and heavy steel beams hold the roof centimetres from your head. Each step of the main staircase has sunken bowls from the many thousands of feet that have trampled it over the centuries.
There are …

It’s a well-known fact that every year a billion people attend the Melbourne Intergalactic Comedy Festival. They come in their millions by plane, boat, gyrocopter and segue. Speaking of segues: the three boys from Hooray for Everything aren’t one.
Matt, Phil and Stevie D left Brisbane by car at six on Sunday morning. (Imagine how early that would have been had daylight saving still been on! Well…It would have still been six in the morning’Brisbane is already too far behind the times to put their clocks back any further.) With 24 …

I love a drink. To tell the truth, I love lots of drinks. In good times and in bad, alcohol has always been there for me, a reliable friend, ready to commiserate or to celebrate. I probably wouldn’t have lost my virginity without it – I had to get that bloke really drunk.
Festivals are the perfect time for me, performing and staying out till the sun comes up, socializing, all with a little help from my friend.
This year, however, I am going to survive the 26 glorious days of the …

This year’s festival has started off on a joyous note: we’re winning the War On Terror. David Hicks has confessed to providing material support for terrorism. The bleeding-heart pinkos no longer have a leg to stand on with their bleating about his unfair treatment. Some went so far as to call it un-Australian, which is patently untrue. The Americans did him the honour of giving him a kangaroo court. Besides, sending a possible criminal to an empty, violent island on the other side of the world and leaving him there …

Wrong Way, Keep Going takes one on a hilarious roller coaster through the life of an average Australian. Adam Rozenbachs tickles, jars, stings, surprises as he delivers wisecracks on everyday occurrences. In the solo performance, his witty arrows never stop falling throughout this fifty-minute kaleidoscope.
There is practically no turf the artist does not trod upon in his tongue-in-cheek delivery. Satire flows freely and the audience laps it up in loud guffaws. No one is spared: ‘museum’ bankers, mobile companies, neglectful parents, illogical traffic codes, even blokes with their ‘cash converted’ …

I got a late phone call to see Wellington WHO, so I decided not to read any of the posters advertising the show and just check it out with no prior idea or expectations.
The first part of my mission late on a Saturday night was to navigate into the bowels of Trades Hall and enter through the doors of The Police Box into a slightly-larger-than-a-broom-closet like room.
After an epic sci-fi type introduction, the title Wellington WHO started to make sense. Craig Wellington declared his geek past and an obsession with …