Comedy Debate

[junglegirl_1976]

Did anyone go to the debate this year? If so, who was on and what was the topic? The website has no details whatsoever!!

[Alisso]

The 20th Annual Melbourne International Comedy Festival Debate

Topic: That Money is the Root of All Evil (now where I have I heard that before? Oh yeah, in the 6th Annual Melbourne International Comedy Festival Debate in 1995!)

Affirmative team:
- Paul McDermott (funny, he was on the negative last time I heard this debated)
- Arj Barker (the flyers said Julia Morris, but we got Arj instead)
- Stephen K Amos

Negative team:
- Rich Hall
- Janeane Garofalo
- Jason Byrne (with a dislocated shoulder)

If you've seen the 1995 one, be prepared for some spooky sensations of deja vu during McDermott's speech, although I was impressed by his ability to take exactly the same information and put it forward as evidence for exactly the opposite argument to the one it was used for last time. At least he has better hair this time around. (But I was a bit disappointed...they revisited "Ignorance is Bliss" two years ago and he managed a brand new, extremely good speech for that, rather than reusing his speech from the last time they did that debate, so I'm not quite sure why he couldn't do it again this time)

Arj Barker seemed terribly random, then proved to have a method to his madness that was actually worth all the effort and made me laugh rather a lot. Stephen K Amos re-used some of his routine from the Gala, but also presented us with a bit of entertaining panto/performance art/interpretive dance featuring far too much nudity from Asher Treleaven (but an excellent little joke about the microphone from Asher).

Rich Hall was clever and funny and finished the night with one of the best rebuttal gags I've seen in quite a while (I won't tell you what it was, but a large animal was involved and caused no end of trouble for everyone). Janeane was, well, short, and to the point, but didn't quite manage to balance the smart arguing side with the funny speech side (usually comedians go in the other direction, presenting an extremely amusing speech that doesn't go very far towards addressing the topic *G*).

And Jason used props and three innocent audience members to make quite a clever point in the argument, that sadly was sidelined by his choice of the phrase "suck the money out of them" (a rare case of an argument being both funny AND clever, but actually being too funny for the clever bit to be appreciated properly *G*). And amazingly, he wasn't hampered by his shoulder, as far as I could see *G*

Overall, a lot of fun, although not a patch on the original...

Should be broadcast on channel ten some time this year (saw the whole GNWTV crew running around trying to keep a lid on the madness) and should be well worth catching.

[junglegirl_1976]

Looking forward to it, thanks Alisso!!!