Melbourne Comedy Festival. LOL. (Actually.)
One of the great things about living in Melbourne is the annual Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Three and a half weeks of non-stop humour. Everything from stand-up to cabaret, theatre to visual arts. Both international and home-grown hilarity. It’s one of the three biggest comedy festivals in the world (the other two are in Edinburgh and Montreal).
We went to Spicks and Speck-tacular: Comedy Festival Remix with a group of friends a couple of weeks ago.
And then on Friday night Cousin It, The Poolboy and I revisited the Festival for our annual ‘Random Night of Comedy’.
It’s random because I put very little effort into researching and choosing our tickets. My method is to pick a date, look up what is on at The Melbourne Town Hall venues (therefore facilitating easy transfers between shows) and, allowing an hour and a quarter for each show, book three in a row.
It’s a method that has served us well in the past – stumbling across gems of shows by people such as Sarah Kendall, Fiona O’Loughlin and Paul McDermott.
But there is a high degree of risk involved.
As we walked up the stairs to The Town Hall on Friday night, we looked at the tickets for the first show: Tom Basden won’t say anything.
“Ha ha,” I said pointing it out to Cousin It, “That will be just so funny won’t it? If he doesn’t say anything, I mean.”
Well, he didn’t.
His entire act was speechlessly conducted via some words and pictures on a powerpoint presentation behind him, and his singing of some songs.
I’m sure some people must find him funny. He’s come all the way from the UK to be in a Comedy Festival after all. But we’re not among that group.
After Cousin It and I stopped laughing hysterically at the realisation that he actually wasn’t going to say anything, we barely tittered. (Except for the song he’s written to perform at Robbie Williams’ funeral, providing he dies in 2009, and Basden beats Elton John to the gig…that, we laughed at.)
Halfway through, alarm bells started ringing and an evacuation whooping sound could be heard..then the sirens of fire engines.
Yay! we thought. We can get out of here.
Alas, it was apparently a burst water pipe and NO NEED FOR EVACUATION.
Damn.
Anyway. After that things looked up.
Next up was Kristen Schaal: As You Have Probably Never Seen Her Before. A New Yorker with a quirky look and a lispy, squeaky voice. And she was funny. LOL funny. So funny that we didn’t really notice that her show went considerably over the advertised 60 minutes.
So we were 15 minutes late for the third…Josh Earl in Where Did I Come From? Josh plays to a relatively small room, which means when three people enter the room 15 minutes into the act, it is a bit obvious. And made us the butt of a couple of jokes later on.
He was excellent – home-grown talent and definitely one to watch for the future. I’d go see him again. His bit about the Australian Women’s Weekly Kid’s Birthday Cakes cookbook really got the audience going.
For a random night, two hits and one miss is probably not a bad record.
