By Lenny Ann Low
The shows to see (clockwise, from top left): Frankie McNair, Die Rotten Punkte, Rosie Jones, Lara Ricote, Suren Jayemanne and Anne Edmonds.
Hundreds of comics with vat-loads of gags are descending on the 37th Melbourne International Comedy Festival. The 2023 program, booming with more than 500 shows, promises an upsurge in fresh, unconventional and innovative comedy, particularly from Australian comics.
Sling on your grins, gird your laughing gear and dive into the shows we’re most excited about.
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Sam Campbell
Sam Campbell is a wizard of erratic and ever-changing comedy.
Winner of best comedy at the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe and most outstanding show at the 2018 Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Sam Campbell is a wizard of erratic, endearing and ever-changing eccentricity. His shows, wrought with simple props, home-made projected imagery and a sense of timing entirely his own, are spellbindingly memorable. Winning one of the most prestigious awards in the comedy world brings a spotlight Campbell, whose show poster features his disquieted face and a backdrop of lychees, deserves. Just don’t expect him to change in the limelight.
Every Single Emotion, Max Watt’s, March 30-April 22
Jordan Gray
Jordan Gray is the myth-busting superhero we all need.
Naked, luxuriously caped and rising epically into the air, Jordan Gray on her poster image is the electric, no-limits, myth-busting superhero we all need. Is It a Bird? – a play on the jibes Gray receives in her home county of Essex – is a whirlwind of witty, wicked jokes and songs from a transgender woman letting joy rip, while spotlighting prejudices about transgender people. She sparks a simpatico urge to celebrate life. Winner of NextUp’s inaugural “biggest award in comedy” at the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe, and now making a sitcom with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, Gray personifies no-limits chutzpah while changing lives in the blink of a lyric.
Is It a Bird?, Melbourne Town Hall, March 30-April 23
Frankie McNair
Frankie McNair delivers “off-off-off Broadway hits you’ve never heard”.
Tabatha Booth, the “Forrest Gump of old Hollywood”, is a messily wigged, heavily medicated torch-song crooning star bringing uncensored gossip from the movie studio golden age. Expect brassiness, a defiant “I’m still here” vibe and a very long-handled fork, as McNair delivers “off-off-off Broadway hits you’ve never heard”. Seen on ABC’s Question Everything, Just For Laughs and holding the 2022 MICF best newcomer trophy, McNair is also bringing back 2022 festival hit Emma’s Debutante, a show created with fellow comic Emma Holland, a pairing Aunty Donna called “the funniest comedians we’ve ever seen”.
An Intimate Evening with Tabatha Booth starring Frankie McNair, Melbourne Town Hall, March 30-April 23
Rosie Jones
Rosie Jones carries an effervescent love of comedy and cracks wit sharper than most.
When Rosie Jones took to the Live at the Apollo stage, her first words were, “Let me address the disabled elephant in the room … that’s what my mum calls me. Bitch.” Jones, who has cerebral palsy, plays masterfully with audiences’ expectations, upturning punchlines and doling out cheek. Fans of her appearances on The Last Leg, 8 Out of 10 Cats, Cats Does Countdown, Mock the Week, and her own series Trip Hazard on SBS will rejoice in her solo festival debut. An advocate for disabled accessibility, she is also author of The Amazing Edie Eckhart, a series of children books about a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy. On stage, she flim-flams preconceptions of disability, carries an effervescent love of comedy and cracks wit sharper than most.
Triple Threat, The Westin One, April 5-22
Laura Davis
Laura Davis has been called “an exciting, urgent and relevant comedian”.
Laura Davis is one of the most perceptive comics and writers around. After their 2022 show If This Is It received acclaim, and a nomination for most outstanding show, at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival Awards, the Edinburgh Fringe season drew glowing plaudits: “an exciting, urgent and relevant comedian” and “laughter that takes power away from the darkness” were two. Davies – who wrote for Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell, won the 2015 Golden Gibbo award and is directing Grace Jarvis’ MICF show, This is the Last Goldfish That I Am Going to Eat For You – is not to be missed. A definite contender for more awards.
Well Don’t Just Stand There Dancing, Campari House, March 28-April 23
Emma Holland
Emma Holland delivers a winning blend of understatement, kookiness and velvet-edged sarcasm.
Holland’s stand-up, a winning blend of understatement, kookiness, deadpan and velvet-edged sarcasm, may also include collage, video artistry and beautifully elongated pauses when dealing with audience interactions. What is this show about? “I grew up in Indonesia and have made it my whole personality,” she says. “This is a show about that.” Holland, who writes and appears on Network 10’s The Cheap Seats and Have You Been Paying Attention, is a regular collaborator with best mate and fellow comic Frankie McNair. Few who witnessed Holland help birth McNair’s “pasta baby” at the annual Festival Club lip-sync battle in 2022 will forget it. An artist and well-respected photographer, Holland’s photos of comedians adorn many a festival poster.
Save the Orangutans, ACMI, March 30-April 23
Tim Key
Brit Tim Key delivers comedy via a character who is regularly simmering with superiority.
Magnetic poetic discourse from a writer, comedian and poet whose lockdown observations, contained in two books, He Used Thought As a Wife and Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, deftly encapsulate the strange, isolated, rule-riven times of recent years. Both became Sunday Times bestsellers, the perfect accompaniment to Key, Mark Watson and Alex Horne’s long-running YouTube series No More Jockeys (“Bop, bop, unicorn mug”). Key’s live comedy, familiar to Melbourne audiences and awarded the Edinburgh Fringe’s Perrier Award, is delivered by a character, sometimes churlish, sometimes chummy, regularly simmering with superiority, frustration and surreal wanderings. His “story of a celebrity sealed away” is a guaranteed winner.
Mulberry, Melbourne Town Hall, April 11-23
Suren Jayemanne
Rising star Suren Jayemanne is as well known for his cooking as his stand-up.
Suren Jayemanne, formerly an accountant, now a Moosehead recipient, delivers his second solo show, this time directed by comedy sage John Safran, in which the rising comic hopes to prove fears and desires are the same thing. Jayemanne fans know his cooking (his prawn curry wowed Adam Liaw on The Cook Up), but he’s also appeared on ABC’s Comedy Next Gen, Comedy Up Late and Tonightly with Tom Ballard, and SBS’s Celebrity Letters and Numbers, and is a writer for ABC’s Question Everything. His parents may not know he is no longer an accountant.
The Bag of Vegeta, The Westin Four, Mar 30-April 23
Comedy Zones
Douglas Lim stars in the festival’s Comedy Zone Asia show.
Rising comedy stars and bang for your buck, Best of Comedy Zone Asia (Arts Centre Melbourne) and Comedy Zone (Trades Hall) offer nine comics all-up. Comedy Zone features Raw Comedy 2022 joint winner Alexandra Hudson along with Ben Hunter, AJ Lamarque, Samuel Gebreselassie and Annie Boyle. Best of Comedy Zone Asia has award-winning Malaysian comic Douglas Lim, Indonesia’s first Muslim female stand-up comic, Sakdiyah Ma’ruf, Kolkata-born, Mumbai-based stand-up Anirban Dasgupta, and Singapore comedian Fakkah Fuzz, fresh from the worldwide release of his Netflix special, Almost Banned.
March 30-April 23
Adrienne Truscott & Le Gateau Chocolat
US performer Adrienne Truscott promises visual, comic and aural pleasure.
Award-winning American performer Adrienne Truscott rarely shies from weighty topics. She won the Edinburgh Comedy Awards panel prize for her show Asking For It: A One-Lady Rape About Comedy Starring Her Pussy and Little Else! which toured to Australia and dissected, among other things, misogynist comedy with ferocious panache. With friend, and powerhouse singer and burlesque artist Le Gateau Chocolat, Grey Arias promises visual, comic and aural pleasure.
Grey Arias, The Malthouse, March 30-April 16
Anne Edmonds
Anne Edmonds dives into the bottom of her wet bag for her new show.
If you own a bag, and you carry things for yourself and other people in it, chances are it will be damp at regular intervals. This is the genesis of Anne Edmonds’ new show, confirmed in Instagram posts featuring her wet bag and water bottle’s wonkily sealed lid. In dry, tell-it-like-it-is realism, Edmonds, also known for Ten’s Have You Been Paying Attention? and emotionally explosive TV sensation Helen Bidou, will mine richly witty seams to find answers.
Why Is My Bag All Wet?, Comedy Theatre, April 1-23
Lara Ricote
Lara Ricote won the Edinburgh Comedy Award for best newcomer at the 2022 fringe.
Mexican-American comic Lara Ricote’s first show, GRL/LATNX/DEF, won the Edinburgh Comedy Award for best newcomer at the 2022 fringe, soon after she won the 2021 Funny Women Stage Award. The show’s title stems from three parts of her identity: race, gender and disability. Ricote is hard of hearing, has Mexican, American and Venezuelan heritage and, in her words, is more girl than woman. This is her “minority show” but, since her swift rise to fame, it’s evolved to include climate activism as well. Goofy, whip-smart and, like all good comedy, pricking pretensions. Ricote is a rapidly rising star.
GRL/LATNX/DEF, The Weston Three, March 30-April 23
Bronwyn Kuss
Ipswich comedian Bronwyn Kuss is winningly dry and matter-of-fact.
When Bronwyn Kuss made her MICF solo show debut with Any Goss? in 2022, she won the Melbourne International Comedy Festival’s director’s choice award, alongside Wil Anderson, and was also nominated for the best newcomer award. Kuss, a writer and comedian from Ipswich in Queensland, is winningly dry and matter-of-fact. Look up her droll dissection of her “gaping shame”.
Sounds Good, The Westin Two, March 30-April 23
Bron Lewis
Bron Lewis champions the glimmer of hope within the utterance “probably”.
Bron Lewis sprang from the 2022 Raw Comedy final as joint national winner with Alexandra Hunter. A winner at the Moth Storytelling Night, a regular at festivals and a writer for The Project, she has worked as support for comics such as Claire Hooper, Sammy J, David Quirk and Geraldine Hickey. Formerly a high school teacher, and a mother of three, Lewis’ new show, Probably, directed by Hooper, champions the glimmer of hope within the utterance “probably”.
Probably, The Westin Four, March 30-April 23
Guy Montgomery
New Zealand’s Guy Montgomery blends old-fashioned indignation with gentle, off-kilter delight.
New Zealand comic Guy Montgomery’s blend of old-fashioned indignation, semi-monotone delivery and gentle, off-kilter delight in the tiny facts and obscurities of the world make his shows as soothing as they are captivating. If you can’t get a ticket to My Brain Is Blowing Me Crazy, make a bee-line to Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont-Spelling Bee (Melbourne Town Hall, March 31-April 21), a four show-only season featuring comedians trying to spell “rendezvous”.
My Brain Is Blowing Me Crazy, The Victoria Hotel, March 30-April 23
The Festival Club
Die Roten Punkte are hosting Haus Party at the Festival Club.
Some of the best, most memorable, most joyously unexpected comedy erupts underground at the Festival Club. Its pot-luck nature means new, legendary and white-hot comics share the mic nightly. Upcoming special events include Haus Party with Die Rotten Punkte, deadly variety night Caboriginal and Michelle Brasier hosting the legendarily epic Lip Sync Battle.
Max Watt’s, March 30-April 22
Also unmissable
Rose Bishop – Feral, Kitty Flanagan – Live, Daniel Kitson – I Shall Have a Good Think When Everybody’s Gone Home, Hannah Camilleri – Lolly Bag, Melanie Bracewell – Ooh La La (encore), Rhys Nicholson – Rhys! Rhys! Rhys! (encore), Mish Wittrup – Butterfingers, Maisie Adam – Buzzed, Scott Boxall – Turbo Lover, Mark Watson – Search and Leo Reich – Literally Who Cares?!
The Melbourne International Comedy Festival runs from March 29 to April 23. The Age is a festival partner.
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