Comfest 2006 Articles

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http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...2-2702,00.html

So, heard the one about the Lord Mayor?

Michael Davis

April 12, 2006

THERE are hundreds of comedians in Melbourne for the 20th international comedy festival - but Lord Mayor John So is the funniest act in town.



The contagiously comic Mr So had his audience in the giggles again when he teamed up with US rappers Freestyle Love Supreme at the festival launch yesterday.

The group cleverly incorporated the Lord Mayor into a preview of their act, and showed why they are billed by festival organisers as "gifted improvisers who can take anything the audience throws at them - in fact, they encourage the occasional curveball".

Mr So said Melbourne people were the happiest in the world and embraced the festival.

"I always enjoy having a laugh at the shows," he said. "Melbourne is such a vibrant city. People take the jokes from the comedy festival back to the trendy bars and cafes. They laugh all the time. It adds a bit of spice to life."

Festival director Susan Provan expects ticket sales this year to top last year's take of $5 million.

The festival, opening at Her Majesty's Theatre tonight, boasts headliners such as Britain's Danny Bhoy, Demetri Martin from the US and Jason Byrne from Ireland.

The local acts include Dave Hughes, Fiona O'Loughlin, Jimeoin, Judith Lucy, Lano and Woodley, Tim Minchin, Tripod and Wil Anderson.

But the festival will also encourage emerging comics prepared to pay the $450 registration fee and have a go.

Some will induce cringes before disappearing back to their workplaces, destined to be the office funny guy and no more. Others will go on to become part of the big gig at Her Majesty's in a few years.

"All comedians have to start somewhere," Provan said. "Stand-up comedy is possibly the hardest genre of the performing arts because the performer is so exposed and the audience feel they have a right to contribute.

"So it can often be quite an uncomfortable environment and there's no character to fall back on. They're really putting themselves out there. "It's a very brave kind of performance - comedy is one the most subjective art forms, and audiences can be so divided."

[Danshep]

The Groggy Squirrel has just put up the first of its comedy festival reviews:

Fox K - I'm telling you for the first time

There's somewhere in the vicinity of 100 reviews coming up during the festival from The Groggy Squirrel (don't worry, I don't intend on posting them all here).

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http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts/e...521447805.html

Easter bunnies

April 15, 2006
Raymond Gill considers the timing of the 20th Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

The Comedy Festival began during the week, and while you can blame its tardiness on the Commonwealth Games ousting it from its usual March spot, you've got to wonder what organisers were thinking when they scheduled the opening for Wednesday night.

So suddenly, no one's heard of Passover? Every comic's a Methodist now, or what? How else are these kids going to deal with hecklers unless they've faced 30 Jewish relatives in one sitting?

It's a truth universally acknowledged (well, in New York, anyway) that Judaism is the one true religion that can furnish a comic with the defence skills necessary for a life of stand-up. Remember Woody Allen's relatives in Annie Hall arguing over which was a better ocean: the Atlantic or the Pacific?

Try envisioning that scene at an Episcopalian family reunion or an Anglican tea-party. And all the creative energy coming out of Catholicism these days is frantically involved in writing plays or memoirs about pedophilia, so count them out of the comedy stakes this year and go and see Doubt instead.

Appallingly, even the Jewish comedians were out there among the 17,000 or so comics who were opening shows across the inner city on Wednesday night, when they should have been at their third cousin's (twice removed) for Pesach, drinking sweet wine, avoiding gefilte fish and catching up on Esther's brother-in-law's second daughter's success with her PhD. At least some of them were keeping to the topic of religion.

Reuben Krum's Out of Line at the Butterfly Club is said to let rip a wry holocaust of Jesus guilt and the unkinder cuts of Jewish life, while Rain Pryor's show Fried Chicken and Latkes, which finishes tonight at the Athenaeum, deals with the challenges of growing up black and Jewish, as expressed in a song to the tune from Cabaret: "What's the big deal if I'm black and a Jew?/ In temple, I sing the blues. / Life is fried chicken and latkes, too. / I'll make Shabbat for you."

Of course, Jews are great comedians because they're brilliant melancholics. No one does melancholy and its close cousin, guilt, like a Jew, though anyone who survived an education at the hands of sadistic Catholic nuns in the 1960s might come a close second.

And, as we all know, misery is the cornerstone of comedic talent. There's nothing like meeting a comedian of any persuasion in everyday life to affirm the fact that comics, while mind-blowingly funny and wired on stage, are invariably boring, wrist-slashing sad-sacks off stage. Ever read an interview with Steve Martin, one of the great comic geniuses of our time? John Howard's funnier.

While we, the punters, will be lining the block around the town hall to spend a few hours and dollars to watch the stand-ups, actors and artistes put on their happy faces and make us positively sick with laughter, remember what a public service they are doing. While we wander off into the night drunk with mirth, bear in mind that they're probably backstage speed-dialling Lifeline.

Pryor's website is a case in point, featuring a "Healing Page" in tribute to the late, great Richard Pryor, her father.

On the page, Rain acknowledges that: "Healing comes in many forms ... Everyone's experience is unique and the work may take anywhere from seconds, days, months, or years to see. The healing process is based on one's belief that he/she can be healed and in accordance to the omnipresent source of all creation." Beautiful.

And evidence that while you can free the slaves from Egypt, you can never free the comic from tragedy.

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http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts/f...e#contentSwap1

As the International Comedy Festival gets into full swing this week, Melburnians can look forward to a lot of laughter - and, perhaps, the odd uncomfortable moment. Simon Castles explores the unwritten rules of comedic etiquette and asks some of our top comedians where they draw the line.

We generally don't like humour that's gratuitously offensive towards victims," says Julian Morrow from satirical group The Chaser. "But at the same time, there's a second vaguely amoral - in fact, explicitly amoral - principle, and that is if it's really funny, then we reconsider it."

In other words, no rules bend quite like the rules of satire and comedy. That's if you accept there are rules, a proposition American comedian Sarah Silverman, for one, throws into some doubt. But more on her later. Certainly comedy has no official rules - nothing carved in stone that says what you can and can't say; nothing that states what's bona fide funny and what's not. French philosopher Henri Bergson wrote a famous essay, Laughter, on the principles of humour, but a century later there's still no definitive dummies' guide to being hilarious, and no complete list of taboo topics.

Comedians live in a world of intangibles. They make their own vague rules about what's funny and what they think they can get away with. But the rules can change as quickly - and irreversibly - as a joke can die. Comedians say there is a line, but it moves all the time. A topic might go from being too raw one day, to bloody risky but OK the next, or it might start at bloody risky and end up passe. It's the comedy world equivalent of guessing the bounce of a Sherrin, and every comedian has got it wrong at least once. Gut instinct is everything.

Spare a thought, then, for the guts of comedians this week, with the 20th Melbourne International Comedy Festival getting into full swing. For many a nervous comedian, the gut instinct is working as hard tonight as the sphincter muscles. From now until May 7, about 230 acts will be striving to make Melburnians laugh, and doing so at a time when we all seem, well, a bit touchy, a bit unsure. Is it OK to laugh at religion? What about terrorism? Are race riots fair game? Do we still have to worry about political correctness? Or was the PC fatally wounded in the culture wars?

Nudging uncertainty levels even higher, from code orange to red, is the new sedition clause in the anti-terrorism legislation. There is a possibility, though considered unlikely, that a satirist might find themselves in trouble if they, say, jokingly urge their audience to feel disaffection with the government. If a comedian does entertain such a lark, they'll want to be pretty sure everyone gets the joke.


Festival director Susan Provan believes that while the sedition law is a concern, comedians won't be easily deterred. "It will take more than the sedition laws to stop Australian performers from continuing to comment on their political environment," she says.

Provan, festival director for the past 11 years, believes no subject is off-limits to comedy. "In my years of doing this I've seen absolutely everything covered. Anything is up for comedic treatment. What really matters, what determines audience response, is how cleverly a subject is dealt with."

Greig Pickhaver, the H. G. Nelson half of Roy and H. G., agrees. If he sees any no-go zone for comedy, it is in the sending-up of hopelessness, despair and helplessness. But even on the darkest topics, he believes there can be a way in. "A good example is poverty in Africa," he says. "I think it's fairly hard to make humour out of that, and yet there is enormous fun to be had at, say, Mariah Carey's contribution to this matter. In the great disjoin between Mariah Carey singing her latest hit single and the curing of poverty of Africa, there is an enormous amount of humour." Pickhaver warms to his theme, a giggle dancing irrepressibly behind his words. "I mean, Mariah does seem to live a very affluent lifestyle, probably a fraction of which would solve a number of problems in Liberia, maybe bring fresh water to Monrovia itself!"

Pickhaver doesn't think a comedian can, or should, always be trying to second-guess what an audience - or particular members of an audience - might find offensive. "I'm sure I've done things that people consider are tasteless, but if you start looking over your shoulder then you're in real trouble because you start to sort of self-censor yourself," he says. "You have to accept that people in the business of being funny are not always going to find a general approval from an audience."

Guy Rundle, who writes for Max Gillies and has worked on TV shows such as Comedy Inc and Full Frontal, also believes anything and everything is ripe for satire, but thinks you have to consider context and avoid shock value simply for the sake of it. "Satire can pretty easily go anywhere because it's always trying to make a point, mount an argument," he says. "You could easily do satire, for example, about the fact that there is social hysteria around child abuse at the same time as half the advertising glossies feature Lolita shots - girls made to look ultra-young in skimpy clothing."


Whether the public will laugh at such satire, of course, is another matter. In 2001, a British satirical TV show called Brass Eye attempted to poke fun at the hysterical and sensational way the media deals with pedophilia. A choice moment in the "mockumentary" showed some grainy, black and white footage of a sinister building, over which was the dramatic commentary: "This clever pedophile has disguised himself as a school." The show caused a furore in Britain, and overnight the program's creator, Chris Morris, became one of the most hated men in the country.

Sarah Silverman has attracted similar vitriol (and the corresponding cult status) in the US for her particular brand of shockingly anti-PC humour. Silverman is an attractive Jewish woman with long black hair and a sweet, toothy smile. Her sister is a rabbi. And yet when Silverman gets on stage - her delivery skipping between deadpan and flirtatious - nothing is sacred.

She targets abortion ("I want to get an abortion, but my boyfriend and I are having trouble conceiving"), AIDS ("When God gives you AIDS, make lemon-AIDS") and race ("The best time to have a baby is when you're a black teenager"), to say nothing of religion, September 11 and the Holocaust. When people criticise her, she turns that into a quip also: "I don't care if you think I'm racist, I just want you to think I'm thin."

Writing in online magazine Slate, Sam Anderson says of this rising star, who is being compared to Lenny Bruce: "If her humour does have a larger purpose, it is that it maps the outer limits of our tolerance." Yet, interestingly, even Silverman owns up to a subject she doesn't find amusing. She won't do jokes about fat women, because she thinks all women feel like they are fat on the inside.

Silverman would probably not think much of Little Britain then, a show in which stars Matt Lucas and David Walliams get plenty of easy laughs out of Bubbles and Desiree Devere, two flabby socialites with pendulous jugs who catfight naked at a holiday health spa. But there is a theory that Silverman and Little Britain (along with the likes of Ali G and South Park) share a new style of humour - one labelled meta-bigotry. It is one of those pop culture theories made to be debated, the gist being that comedians are being racist and bigoted in order to skewer racism and bigotry. They are manipulating stereotypes about stereotypes. The new generation of comedians is out to appal us into perhaps recognising uncomfortable things about ourselves and our cosy PC chatter.


It's a dangerous game, but not without precedent. The character Archie Bunker in the 1970s American sitcom All in the Family was highly prejudiced, forever mouthing off about "spics", "yids" and "spades". The intention of the show's producers was to make him a figure of ridicule. But Americans loved Archie - there was even an "Archie for President" campaign - and research found that, if anything, the character reinforced the prejudices of many viewers.

Racist caricature is now taken to such extremes, however, that the message can hardly be misconstrued. Take Maggie in Little Britain. She's an upstanding member of various local women's organisations who, upon perceiving the taint of someone of another race or class, projectile vomits with impunity over everyone around her. There is no campaign for Maggie to be prime minister. But nor is everyone laughing. Writing in The Observer, journalist Barbara Ellen called Little Britain "ill-conceived and spiteful", and was critical of fans gushing that they loved the show because it was so un-PC. "What these people don't seem to realise," she wrote, "is that the cliche of political correctness has long had to budge up to make room for the equivalent cliche of political incorrectness, and both are as tedious as each other."

Popular Channel Nine veteran Pete Smith thinks that comedy today has lost much of its innocence, and with it much of its charm. "A lot of comedy has gone into the shock area - you can get away with virtually anything," he says. "But the trouble with the shock thing is that it doesn't leave you anywhere to go. Where do you go after that?"

In the days of In Melbourne Tonight in the '60s, this wasn't a problem - not when a pie in the face could raise a big laugh. Smith, an announcer at Nine for 43 years who worked on IMT, recalls how the word "bloody" was sometimes used if a show was really flagging and the audience needed a rev-up on a cold Melbourne night. But such was the outrage caused by the word, comedian Joff Ellen had an agreement with the network that he was only allowed to say it once a fortnight.

"One night Joff said 'bloody' twice and everything hit the fan," remembers Smith. "The chairman of the board was on the phone, advertisers were threatening to withdraw. It was very serious. Joff was called up before the general manager for an explanation. Two minutes later he bounces back into the canteen, bright as a button. Graham (Kennedy) nearly shook him to death, and said, 'You've had us so worried. What happened?' Joff said: 'Well, I told him I'm going on holiday for a fortnight tomorrow, so I thought I'd just get my quota in!' "


It's a good story, and as gently evocative of another time as Gra-Gra's impish smile. But we should be wary of getting too wistful about a golden era. The success in recent years of The Chaser, Kath & Kim and We Can Be Heroes, not to mention the consistent brilliance of Roy and HG and John Safran, is testimony that TV satire is in a pretty healthy state in Australia - particularly when compared to TV drama. And despite frequent warnings that satire is dead - songwriter Tom Lehrer famously said that "political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize" - somehow satire, like the novel, lives on and grows in surprising ways.

Laura Waters, a co-producer on Kath & Kim and the producer of We Can Be Heroes, the surprise TV hit of 2005, thinks there is great freedom and potential in satire. She came to comedy after many years of doing current affairs, and says comedy is the better place to be. "I used to cover topics in a really kind of serious way, and it's so much more satisfying to be basically covering the same ground through comedy," she says. "With comedy you can get people to think about things via characters, and they don't really realise they're doing it . . . I think you can actually cover much more controversial things in comedy than in news and current affairs."

Certainly plenty of controversial topics will be joked about during the comedy festival. Wendy Little's show, Limited Sedition, features seven acts of sedition (she urges a lot of disaffection), as well as the "accidental" burning of an Aussie flag. In the publicity showbag sent to media, there is a small flag, a box of matches and some simple instructions. Fortunately for Little, burning the flag isn't a crime in Australia - although Liberal MP Bronwyn Bishop last month put up a private member's bill to make it one. But is Little at all worried her seditiousness will get her into trouble? "I can't imagine them coming to my little show and arresting me, but then the Government doesn't really have a sense of humour, do they?" she says.

Professor George Williams, an expert in constitutional law at the University of NSW, believes the sedition law is a threat to comedians and satirists. "If the law is applied strictly, there is a genuine concern about it extending to comedy and, in particular, satire," he says. "There is no defence that says if you do something in good faith for the purposes of humour that you are exempted."


Under the sedition clause, a person can be jailed for seven years for encouraging or urging seditious intention. While Williams thinks it is highly unlikely that a comedian will be prosecuted, he says the threat alone could stifle free speech. "People might censor themselves because they are worried about the consequences. That's the biggest impact, in my view."

Local comedians are making a show of not being intimidated. This year's festival includes an event at the Old Melbourne Gaol, where comedians will stand behind bars and compete to see who can be the most seditious. The winner will take home the inaugural Golden Guy Fawkes Award for "the comedian most likely to blow up Parliament".

Rod Quantock, a man who has never been afraid to say exactly what he thinks, will host the event. Quantock was at the first Melbourne Comedy Festival in 1986, and says his solo show this year is a commemoration of his "lack of progress". Clearly it will take much more than sedition laws to shut this man up. "I ran a raffle for al-Qaeda at a concert recently where the audience could win a holiday to a cave in Afghanistan with the terrorist of their choice - and I wasn't arrested for that," he says cheerfully.

As if to further demonstrate he won't be cowed, Quantock will take out a black marker each night of his festival show and, on a whiteboard, draw a caricature of the prophet Mohammad - basically a stick figure complete with turban and a smile. The "joke" is either brave or foolhardy, but Quantock says the threats of a tiny minority of radical Muslims should not disable the liberal tradition of free speech.

Another comedian who gets a lot of good material out of religion and terrorism is Akmal Saleh. Because of his Arabic name and appearance - he was born in Egypt but grew up in Australia - Saleh probably gets away with more than most comedians. In his current show, he jokes about the Cronulla riots, which happened right outside his door. He recalls the day: "I'm married to a white Australian girl. I was getting text messages about the riot from the Lebanese; my girlfriend was getting texts from the Anglos. We looked at each other and thought, we shouldn't go out and riot, this is ridiculous. So we just stayed at home and bashed each other up."

Race, religion, riots, terrorism - these are the subjects testing the limits of satire in 2006. Indeed, so potentially incendiary are these topics that even when raised within the scribbled borders of a cartoon world they can prove explosive. The Danish cartoons of Muhammad led to riots around the world. Illustrations of politicians humping like dogs caused a diplomatic incident between Australia and Indonesia. An episode of South Park was pulled off the air by SBS. And Isaac Hayes - the voice of Chef on the show - quit because an episode lampooned Scientology.


Closer to home, The Age and The Chaser team found themselves embroiled in a cartoon controversy of their own. Richard Cooke, a young man with links to The Chaser, sent a Michael Leunig drawing to a Holocaust cartoon competition run by an Iranian newspaper. The Chaser quickly distanced themselves from Cooke's actions.

"I reckon submitting the cartoon to the newspaper was a very clever idea," says Julian Morrow. "But I think purporting to be Leunig wasn't a very clever idea. That's the distinction. And I have pompously said that we would have made a different judgement, which is probably giving us more credit than we deserve. But we certainly weren't involved in the decision-making process."

And The Chaser does always work as a team, even if individual members sometimes strongly disagree on what's fair game. They thrash things out, and make a call. They rely on the attributes of all good satirists: gut instinct and the confidence to believe something is funny, even while knowing that some people won't like it one little bit.

An edition of The Chaser newspaper came out on September 12, 2001, with a front-page headline "World Trade Centre janitor says best sickie ever", followed by pages of similar-toned stories inside. The paper took Lenny Bruce's dictum that "satire is tragedy plus time" and turned it on its head. The boys did cop some flak. Looking back on that edition, Morrow says the stories ranged from funny to passable to bad taste. "I suppose in a sense we're professionally insensitive. That's part of our job description," he says.

But Morrow still thinks there is a line - somewhere - for all satirists. "We often joke that there is a line and the way we find it is by looking over our shoulder and saying, 'Oh shit, that was the line'. But it exists. It's still there."

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http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts-r...126094306.html

Rich Hall & Mike Wilmot: Late Night Standup

By Emma Westwood
April 18, 2006

Blistering comedy double fuelled by sex and anger.

Rich Hall and Mike Wilmot (L)



GenreComedyLocationMelbourne Town HallAddress90-130 Swanston Street, MelbourneDate14 April 2006 to 29 April 2006Tickets$31/$25 (concession)Phone Bookings1300 660 013Online Bookingswww.comedyfestival.com.auDetailsApril 14, 15, 21, 22, 27, 28, 29 and May 4, 5, 6 only. 11.15pm.
COMEDY FESTIVAL REVIEW

This show is so wrong - but in the very best sense of the word. With every known expletive flying, American comic Rich Hall and Canadian Mike Wilmot push at the breaking point of their audience and are richly rewarded with riotous laughter. And a whole lot of it.

Hall requires no time to find his feet. Like an angry terrier at the trouser leg of George W., he sets a blistering pace through which conservative America bears the full force of his anger.

When Wilmot steps up, he steers the show in a different direction - sex. Buoyed by the energy of Hall, this self-confessed fat man proceeds to strip every conceivable morsel of romance from relations between man and woman.

Sex, as relayed through Wilmot, is the single most ludicrous human impulse.

Fans of these comics may recognise some older material, but the strength of the jokes and the freshness of their delivery means you'll laugh even if you've heard it before.

Seeing Hall and Wilmot together is witnessing comedy in its finest form.

The tears of joy will stream down your face and your sides will literally split.

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http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...001562,00.html

It's a riot and you could end up in stitches

Thuy On

April 20, 2006

Ridiculusmus
Malthouse Theatre, April 13.
Dylan Moran
Melbourne Town Hall, April 14.
Spymonkey
RMIT Capitol, April 15.
Demetri Martin
Melbourne Town Hall, April 15.
Danny Bhoy
Athenaeum Theatre, April 16.
The festival continues until May 7.



THE Melbourne Comedy Festival was launched back in 1987 by those inestimable jokesters Peter Cook and Barry Humphries, and this year's is the biggest, with more than 200 shows.

Roguish, unkempt Dylan Moran is just one of the international drawcards. Best known for his comedy series Black Books, Moran has a stand-up schtick remarkably similar to his misanthropic alter ego, Bernard Black. Chain-smoking throughout the hour-long gig, with a beer at the ready, Moran has a line in laid-back pub philosophising that is funny without being radically innovative in its themes. Australian references (hello huge jumping mice) and a few sacrilegious comments (nicely timed for Easter) soon make way for swipes at the culture of self-improvement and various observations on battles of the sexes.

Moran does the lovable Irish curmudgeon routine well and his sarcastic treatment of topics that include baby boomers, generationY and the Wiggles raises a chuckle or four.

Pity Spymonkey cause no such reaction. Spymonkey is a quartet of performers from Spain, Germany and England. Their show, Cooped, can be described as many things: a play within a play, a gothic romance and a melodramatic farce. Claims that the troupe's brand of physical comedy is somewhere between Monty Python, the Marx Brothers and Samuel Beckett are, however, lamentably an empty boast. It all starts off promisingly enough, with a damsel in distress being attacked in an isolated mansion. So far, so English murder mystery. But things become decidedly more stupid as a balding Spanish soap star, a lecherously sinister butler and a pompous lord of the manor all start competing for attention. For cheap laughs, the four inexplicably transform into stereotypical Chinese characters performing - what else? - martial arts. A short while later they're Orthodox Jews beating each other up in the manner of Groucho, Zeppo and Harpo. Bubble-gum pop dance and song numbers break up the already muddled narrative. It's all very undergraduate but, then again, if you like gratuitous nudity, fart jokes, silly accents and ping-pong balls flying out between legs, then Cooped may raise some sniggers. Otherwise, it's about as mirth-making as a wet week in April.

Hurrah, then, for festival stalwart Demetri Martin. While his comedic peers spray invective and froth at the mouth over societal slights, this American turns the criticism inwards. Here his gentle, self-deprecating humour is once again on display.

This show is hosted by his unseen therapist (a midget with a high-pitched voice) who takes us through young Martin's various neuroses. Martin's chronic lack of cool is illustrated with the aid of line drawings, watercolours and childhood snapshots.

It's hard not to laugh at this self-confessed introspective nerd who's good at maths and palindromes ("Ya, get an ID, robust subordinate gay"), but amid the laughter lies a lot of empathy for his social awkwardness.

Danny Bhoy is another comedian for whom the word charming might have been invented. Supremely confident, with a disarmingly cheeky grin, Bhoy is a consummate performer who seems to love his audience almost as much as it loves him. His latest show is loosely based on his Scottish heritage and he oscillates between mocking the bagpipes-and-black-pudding aspects of it to fondly recounting its high alcohol, poor diet and non-sporty culture.

But Bhoy digresses from nationalistic pride often, venturing into a wide range of material including jokes about online Scrabble, hymns, French accents, menu listings, bogans and fireproof flags. If you're planning to see a few international acts, the boyish Mr Bhoy should be one of them. Those who are fed up with scatter-gun stand-up and want a bit of well-proven wit may enjoy Ridiculusmus's take on The Importance of Being Earnest, in which two blokes cross-dress their way through the nine characters of Oscar Wilde's play. It's well worth seeing for the increasingly manic pacing, the ill-fitting wigs, the paisley-papered fridge and Lady Bracknell with a chicken adorning her head.

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http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts/c...e#contentSwap1

Curse of the comic

April 21, 2006

Newcomers no more, from left: Rhod Gilbert; Mark Watson; Tim Minchin; Charlie Pickering.
Photo: Michele Ferguson




Comedy is such a fickle mistress, as four of her lovers found out. By Michael Dwyer.

FOUR comedians walk into a bar. Nobody laughs. They're here to interview each other about two of the most harrowing topics known to their profession: winning comedy awards and the closely related concept of imminent and total failure.

In the British corner are Mark Watson and Rhod Gilbert. Charlie Pickering and Tim Minchin are from Australia. Last year, each was nominated for one of the most prestigious comedy prizes in the world - the Perrier Award for best newcomer at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Each has reaped respectable short-term rewards but only one is officially the funniest new kid in town.

"What's it feel like in your hands?" Watson asks Minchin.

"It felt like relief," says the reigning champ, a wild-haired, mascara-smeared piano guy from Perth. "Competitions are awful 'cause I've lost ever since Battle of the Bands at first year uni.

"I've got used to that name being read out, knowing you shouldn't invest anything in it. It's only a competition, you don't know who the judges are - it's not a judgement of you. But when the moment comes and they say, 'The winner is some other c--!', that feeling is awful."

Never mind the trophy, he looks like he may throw up anyway.

"There was a lot of pressure on you," Rhod Gilbert tells him with a fair semblance of sympathy. The imposing Welshman has nearly every important British comedy award on his mantelpiece back home - apart from a coveted Perrier.

"We were all in pissy little rooms and you were in this massive theatre!" he says. "I hadn't even seen your show but I put 100 quid on you to win the Perrier three months before Edinburgh started."

"Did you?" Watson seems offended. He's shared stand-up bills with Gilbert in Britain for years. "How much did you win?"

"A hundred quid."

"God, I'm feeling worse now."

"I don't think art should involve gambling," Pickering says.

The former Triple J DJ from Melbourne has done pretty well from his winnings, too. He was named best international guest by New Zealand's Comedy Guild last year. That and a hint of Perrier action definitely add value to posters for his new show, Auto.

"For me, it was four days I didn't have to flyer," he says of the nomination. "And it meant that booking agents return my emails now. I couldn't have wanted more out of a festival than that."


"It's ridiculous," Watson says. "It puts you in a position where you evaluate your own show by a completely arbitrary guide. All of us had a really good month. We had good audiences, good reviews - it would have been stupid to walk away from Edinburgh thinking, 'Ah, that was a waste of time'."

On this, there's emphatic agreement. The conversation slowly rises to a fever pitch of backhanded compliments and paranoid shop-talk, a kind of black comedy workshop in which victory and defeat emerge as equal partners regardless of who takes home the prizes.

Pickering says the nomination gave him absolute confidence to write the show he wanted. Watson, more jittery by nature, says it made him more scared. "I feel like some sort of backlash is inevitable now," he says.

"Oh, I'm petrified, dude, petrified!" wails Minchin. "You're freakin' me out!"

The consensus is: it's a flawed system, not least because awards tend to revolve around the hot new acts while ignoring more experienced and superior practitioners of the craft.

"People like the new thing," Pickering says. "They like saying, 'We discovered this guy.' When I was new it was heaps easier to get attention. You think you're doing alright and then you watch Rich Hall for five minutes and you realise you don't know shit about comedy."

From their side of the fence, peer assessment seems a more reliable guide to a comedian's value. In that spirit, Watson proclaims Gilbert "Most Thorough Practitioner, or something. If I did the same stuff it would last 15 seconds but Rhod can wring eight or 10 jokes out of it."

Gilbert returns the compliment with touching sincerity. "Mark is gonna shape the UK comedy industry pretty significantly I think, in the next few years. What are you now, 25?"

"26."

"Oh, right. Forget what I was gonna say then."

Pickering suggests that maybe Watson and Gilbert are "the difference between Oasis and Radiohead. You enjoy Radiohead because it's a complete creation but you enjoy Oasis because you think, 'f--, I could probably be in Oasis'."

"I'd rather be Radiohead," Watson says.

"I'm a bit more of a Thom Yorke/Noel Gallagher side project," Pickering says. "Mainly acoustic shit."

"I don't understand," says Minchin, whose background is more jazz-slanted. "Every time I see a comic I just panic. I think I'm more Elvis Costello or something."

"What award shall we give Tim?" Gilbert asks. "What about Perrier Best Newcomer?"

Everyone laughs. Minchin looks nervous.

Mark Watson, Rhod Gilbert, Charlie Pickering and Tim Minchin are appearing at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. For details go to www.comedyfestival.com.au

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Melbourne International Comedy Festival



NEXT YEAR the Melbourne International Comedy Festival turns 20. The robust diversity of its 2006 season, now finishing the first week of a four-week program, will ensure it remains one of the three largest and most esteemed comedy festivals in the world.

Able to take risks with curating, size and programs, the festival centred at the Melbourne Town Hall is one big, slick beast. Lesser-known venues, such as Trades Hall, still try their luck and it is possible to feel the city has been invaded by comedy. That honour, though closer after the expansion of the Cracker Comedy Festival and the Big Laugh's continued presence, still evades Sydney.

Of the Melbourne festival's home-based creations, Die Roten Punkte (The Red Dots) is a well-crafted and well-performed idea. Clare Bartholomew and Daniel Tobias play Otto and Astrid Rot, members of a fictional brother-sister rock band with more than a passing resemblance to the White Stripes.

The device also inspires thoughts of Donny and Marie Osmond, and the Carpenters. Die Roten Punkte are angry, narcissistic tantrum-lovers bearing arty haircuts and a glorious vacuum of talent.

Living a lipstick-smeared, self-important dream of being an alternative rock band from Berlin, every one of their self-referencing songs ( Best Band in the World is one) is the same. Astrid pounds her dinky girl-size drum kit with studied, self-aware showiness, and Otto fingers his electric guitar like a petulant five-year-old denied cake. The show stretches the joke thinly but its observation of rock music's pouty pretentiousness is sharply done.

Tim Minchin, meanwhile, pushes his jokes to match a critical profile few could hope to match. The Australian comic-musician won the 2005 Perrier Best Newcomer Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and has received critical acclaim here and overseas for his perverse, sweet and on-edge musical shows.

Barefoot, backcombed and buttoned into a black overcoat, Minchin's stage persona is a cross between a paranoid scarecrow, a poetic hermit and a virtuoso pianist. He plays and sings soaring songs with lyrics that marry impassioned love with malignant tumours, that implore, with a twinkly menace, parents to stop feeding doughnuts to obese children. He is an extraordinary musician with a very watchable vaudeville character trading in poetic shock and logic.

Ireland's David O'Doherty takes a gentler, less traumatised approach. In the ornate Town Hall, he is the wizard of rumpled whimsy. In his shambolic way he sings of smashing the big guys in global corporations, loving his annoying dog, Florence, and bringing down "the perfect storm of shitness" that is the pop-opera group Il Divo. His weapons? Two small electric piano organs, a cheeky fury and an ability to magnify the smaller moments in life into mesmerising little comedy operas.

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It's easy to spot an absurdist show at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, writes Fiona Scott-Norman.

Travelling hopefully, like tiny marshmallow rafts on a heaving sea of Daves, Dans and Best of Fests, the absurdist comic announces himself (and they are all hims) with a show title that screams contrast through gentleness, whimsy and downright peculiarity: Portholes Into the Minds of the Vanquished, The Sunshine Factory, LaLaLuna, Tales From the Erotic Cat, Birdmannifesto and, spectacularly, Blood On the Yolks In the Key of Owls.

You have, as it were, been warned. These are not doors to knock on if you want a reliable hour of set-'emup and knock-'em-down jokes. Best go see a Dave for that sort of palaver. Absurdist comedy, usually following in the grand tradition of absurdist theatre, is existential in nature and designed to perplex, tickle, interrogate, confound and delight.

The emerging king of absurdist comedy in Melbourne is Sam Simmonds (although he prefers the term "jazz comedy"). A zookeeper by day, and seriously strange by night, Simmonds has two shows this year, the solo Tales From the Erotic Cat, and a return season of The Sunshine Factory with Dave Callan, a play inspired by Waiting For Godot, set in a lighthouse after the bulb burns out.

Simmonds has built a formidable reputation on the stand-up circuit with routines about an erotic cat and deconstructing nursery rhymes, and songs such as the one about being molested in a caravan park. Beginning with what was essentially an absurdist society called Being Weak at school, he's spent many years honing his unconventionality.

"Me and my best friend in Adelaide were just odd kids," he says. "When we were 10, we built the lost city of Atlambo out of old plastic bottles, and nailed it to the top of the pergola at school.

"I've been through periods where I just bewilder and isolate people, and I don't want to do that any more. "I've learned that the key is to perform with absolute conviction. That way you can stand on stage and, say, imagine a circle to music, and it works. It's a terrifying thing to do. But the unpredictability is what makes it funny. People walk out and say, 'I've never seen anything like that before, and I laughed'."

Warwick Allsopp, half of A Porthole Into the Minds of the Vanquished (with Tamlyn Henderson), proclaims the power and allure of the anti-punchline. "Comedy is very formulaic, and we have a lot of stuff that doesn't make sense. It takes a little while for people to get onto our wavelength, but we deconstruct language to the point where people become comfortable not knowing what's coming next.


"It's 50 minutes where the rational mind no longer applies, where you have to blur your mind. It's very freeing," says Allsopp, who hails from Perth and claims that everything made sense when he read Waiting For Godot in year 11.

Porthole is a (sort of) play created from text messages/poems/ thoughts sent between Allsopp and Henderson over three years.

Another play, LaLaLuna, about a dreaming man who has to replace the light in the moon, uses a lot of visual imagery - sand pouring endlessly from a shoe, pulling a ukulele from a drawing pad, and a nightmare sequence of multiplying fuzzy rabbits.

According to LaLaLuna's writer-performer, Wolfe Bowart, who hails from New York via Arizona, Mexican folklore speaks of the rabbit in the moon.

Bowart's parents and grandparents were writers and painters, and, as a child, he watched Tati, Chaplin, Keaton - and the Dali film Un Chien Andalou.

"I like to play with clown logic - going off in one direction and suddenly taking a right-hand turn. That's where the comedy comes from. But the show has layers - there's a melancholy, bittersweet feeling at the end. There's joy, and a tear in your eye," says Bowart.

Absurdist stand-ups are less common, but Sydney comic Nick Sun (Blood on the Yolks In the Key of Owls), who won Raw Comedy in 2004, is finding himself in that territory as a reaction against standard comedy structure.

"Part of me hates the whole set-up-punchline thing," says Sun. "I'm trying to get rid of that entire syntax and create my own, but, on the downside, that means a lot of failure, because I'm constantly reinventing myself at the moment, the new cracking through the old, trying to get rid of my influences and find out who I am.

"To be honest, I should have called my show Hit and Miss."

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The best comedy knows no geographical boundaries, writes Stephanie Bunbury, and much of it can be witnessed in Melbourne during the final week of the Comedy Festival.

WHAT'S SO funny? Two weeks into the Comedy Festival now; a lot more laughs to go. Laughter: the universal panacea. Not, of course, that it necessarily is universal. Travel writer Martha Gellhorn noticed when she was in central Africa that the real distinction between peoples must surely be sense of humour; nothing about the naked village women about her seemed half as foreign as their collective sense of humour. They laughed a lot, she could see, but why? She could never see the joke.

We often take this as a truism, that what we find funny is a product of age, class and culture. A friend of mine lecturing in media hooked up with an American counterpart to monitor his class's response to an episode of Kath and Kim. They didn't laugh at all. But, objected plenty of the people who interviewed her about it, what else would anyone expect? Why did she waste taxpayers' money (as they say) on that phone call to hear what everyone already knew? That Americans don't do irony?

At other moments, however, "everyone" equally knows that we are all the same under the skin and that we can all get along if we just have a laugh. Interestingly, nobody is more adamant about the universality of comedy than the comedians on the front line. "I've always thought that if funny is funny, funny travels," says Glenn Wool, a Canadian who has worked in Britain for nine years and is now in Melbourne. "There might be subtle differences in the crowd, but it's not enough to shake something that is actually funny."

He prefers working in Britain, he says, because Canadians are more easily offended. "I don't think I say anything offensive" (at least, not for someone who starts his set with a joke about anal sex) "but I prefer London as they are so cynical and you can take it to another level." But anyone who notices significant national differences, he says, is probably doing material so parochial that it excludes anyone else.

"Then they say the differences are vast but it's just that people don't understand the references. They can put together what the joke is, but unless it's something close to their heart they are not going to say 'oh yes, there has clearly been an injustice here somewhere' and laugh out loud."

Anything that has a local equivalent, however, will work - which, according to English comic Daniel Kitson, generally means anything at all within the English-speaking world. Everyone has talent competitions and reality shows on television, whether they watch them or not. Everyone recognises the same kinds of social tribes, the same embarrassments and bones of social contention. There cannot be a corner of the globe left, for example, where you couldn't raise a titter with a decent gag about mobile phones.


But even if Wool is right, that funny is funny wherever you take it, it is still true that different places produce different kinds of funny. Not so long ago, British critics regularly lamented the state of the local sitcom; no local writing was as funny, clever or scintillatingly professional as the comedies coming out of America - written, as everyone knew, by teams of razor-sharp comedians jockeying for position.

What was meant, really, was that nothing was as good as Seinfeld or The Simpsons, both critical favourites and broadly popular, although for the purposes of this argument "good" could also include such astonishingly successful money-spinners as Friends. Americans had discipline. They did joke counts, checking off laughs against minutes. They were better because they were ruthless.

At pretty much precisely the time that this became the conventional view, however, British comedy was being revitalised, even reborn, in the two zones way below the radar of these critical observers: fringe theatre and radio. In the early 1990s, Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci started a spoof news show called The Day Today, which later transferred to television.

Morris was later to cause outrage with a fake news show called The Brass Eye in which he persuaded real politicians and celebrities to rail against entirely imaginary social problems: "animal suicides", "heavy electricity" and a fictitious drug from Prague called "cake" that one Conservative MP promised Morris he would raise in parliament. The Daily Mail described Morris as "the most loathed man on television". Novelist Will Self suggested he was God.

For Australians of a certain age, there were echoes here of Norman Gunston and his inspired interviews with bewildered stars who thought they were supposed to be on a chat show. Roy and HG, particularly during the Sydney Olympics, were similarly prepared to charge into no-go areas, although even they might have stopped short of Morris' satire on pedophilia.

What was particular to this British "school" of comedy, however, was its surrealism, twists on language and unembarrassed intellectualism: it was comedy for people who read books, and made sure everyone knew it. Indeed, Dylan Moran's and Graham Lineham's Black Books, set in a second-hand bookshop, was a classic example of the genre.

A current one is Green Wing, a bizarre comedy about a large teaching hospital in which time is continually sped up and slowed down; patients and their afflictions are never mentioned; and the ongoing plots, like the one about the anaesthetist who unknowingly has sex with his own mother, crash every taste barrier. As far as comedy is concerned, the revolution is being televised.


This new wave is also very specifically British in its theatrical background. Some of the television comedies of the past few years, such as The League of Gentlemen and The Mighty Boosh, began as theatre shows; others merely reference the tradition in their use of over-articulated language and improvisation. There even seems to be a loose repertory group of actors and writers who swap between shows of a similar ilk, a sharp contrast to the American preferences for fresh ensembles or star vehicles.

Almost all of this work is for the small screen, but many actors familiar from Spaced, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Green Wing pop up in a new feature film, Confetti, a satire on the wedding industry in which both dialogue and plot were entirely improvised.

Interestingly the director, Debbie Isitt, knew almost none of these actors before she started working with them.

"I think the thing I aspired to do was use a company of actors in the same way I've done in theatre for 24 years," she says. "And for me, that comes from theatre, not television. You have to engage an audience, you don't want to bore them, you want to give them a dramatic, fulfilling experience, you want to hear laughter but you also want to hear a few tears. I'm always saying I want the audience to laugh, cry and think. That's the principle I've always worked on."

Most significant of all, perhaps, is the new television comedy's use of silence. Caroline Aherne's The Royle Family challenged every platitudinous assumption about what made a sitcom funny by sticking to a static set and turning tedium into a comic effect.

Then came The Office, which pushed silence right into Harold Pinter territory and brought a new intensity to British comedy's great subject: miserable, toe-curling social embarrassment. Again, however, it is a British subject that has mutated painlessly into an excellent American version of the show; as Glenn Wool says, funny is funny.

Those silences were initially possible because, in British comedy, muddle is OK. Not everything has to work. The comedy in British sitcoms emerges, sometimes quite slowly or slyly, from character rather than from one-liners. Some stand-ups are as snappy as Seinfeld, but the comedian most namechecked by other comedians, Daniel Kitson, is a shambling, chaotic presence with a significant stutter. It all adds up to the opposite of a joke count. It is also, as Kitson particularly insists, not for everyone.


For the past couple of years, Kitson has been trying to deter audiences he doesn't like; as he puts it, "to stop c---s coming" . This is not easy. Television comedies such as Green Wing are counted as hits on the basis of thinly spread audiences of the like-minded; if you turn on a show at random, you soon know whether it's for you. Stand-up comedy is, first and foremost, a night out. Kitson says he can rail against drunks in the audience and the drunks will say, "Hey hey! He's talking about us! Great!" and come back the next time.

"It is easy to think ignorance can't be that tenacious, but it is," he says. "It is just as likely someone will like me for all the wrong reasons and like me for far longer than someone I do want to like me." When I saw him, the night before he left for Australia, he paid someone £20 to leave; the ticket price was £8 but Kitson didn't have change. It was worth it, he says. "He was texting for ages and it wasn't so much that, it was that he did that thing of saying 'oh, just carry on'. And that annoyed me. I just decided I'd rather he wasn't there."

What this reflects, albeit in an entirely personal way, is the niche character of the best of current comedy. There have always been class distinctions in humour, obviously, but this is less about class than tribe, about laughing at the same things as people like us and not laughing at the things other kinds of people find funny. We're past talking about whether Americans get irony - maybe a lot don't, but the ones like us do - or which side of the Atlantic does funny better. In this context, it doesn't matter where comedy comes from: for Americans, English, Australians, Canadians or any other variety of Anglophone, funny is funny. It just isn't funny for everybody.

www.comedyfestival.com.au

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One hell of a joke

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May 1, 2006

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It's a dangerous business, but laughing at religion is more popular than ever, writes Greg Burchall.

Ok. There's this Australian lapsed Catholic and a some-kind-of- Protestant- Canadian who meet in a cafe to discuss the afterlife over coffee (with cream) and tea (with a slice of lemon) and jet lag (hangover).

"I don't know if there's a God," says the Catholic. "I'd want there to be a God. I think it'd be awesome if there was."

"I'll be going to hell," offers the Canuck. "Property prices are probably better than in heaven, so I'm looking forward to it."

Then a waiter arrives and asks: "Which one gets the punchline?"

Religion, like politics and mothers-in-law, has long been a comedy quagmire, but in these days of touchy theologies, riotinspiring newspaper cartoons and people who think The Da Vinci Code is non-fiction, it's a martyr-bound comic, indeed, who announces that his show will make fun of faith.

Shaggy-haired Canadian Glenn Wool (right) was last in town in 2003 with his Bizarre Cocktail, and returns with Where is Hell?

"There was never any time that I set out to write a show about hell," he says. "It was just a subject that has constantly occurred to me over a 10-year span — which probably says something about my behaviour over that period."

Hell can be the pure purgatory of a tail-spin gig in a faraway place - something Wool now has sorted.

"The first time I was here, it took me a while to find the audience. I didn't know if they were like the British or more like Americans. Then, about halfway through, I discovered you were just like Canadians. I thought, 'I know these people!'."

One of those people is Michael Chamberlin, a rising young jester who was a writer/performer on TV's Skithouse, won the artists' choice Piece of Wood award at the 2002 Melbourne International Comedy Festival, and last year played it masterfully with the sports-themed There's a Party at Stefan Edberg's Place.

But this year he's also tilting at the religious — remodelling the Ten Commandments, no less. "I went to this big old strict Catholic school, where the commandments were rammed down our throats," he says.

"They're 3000 years old and, clearly, society has changed in that time — perhaps they need modernising. We have all these religious tensions and these rules are at the foundations — people picking the ones that suit them — but maybe it's the rules that are flawed."


Chamberlin and Wool outrage and amuse each other with childhood tales from their opposite creeds. Chamberlin recalls "Friday morning voluntary mass", which, naturally, was mandatory. Wool admits to being "into" Sunday school before he realised "there were no real ramifications for jerking around".

Chamberlin and Wool aren't the only comics in town to turn their attention to thoughts sacred and aberrant. Most comics find themselves riffing on the religious — if only in passing — while others succumb to total possession, such as Michael Sharkey, who, as Pastor Michael, promises to heal the sick, speak in tongues and collect money.

Greg Fleet, Nelly Thomas and others will discuss whether faith divides more than it unites, and whether there's anything worth believing anyway in a Weekend Trade debate during the festival.

Notions of heaven and hell have inspired centuries of art in every medium. Whether these places can be visited and known in a Lonely Planet sort of way, or whether they already exist in the detail of our everyday lives is something the church and comedy continue to catechise.

Chamberlin is still wary of straying too far from the church and facing a vengeful deity.

"Getting banned from the church would be kind of scary," he says. "Be like getting banned from a casino. Or anywhere else that serves alcohol."

You Gotta Have Faith, featuring Christos Tsiolkas, Greg Fleet and Nelly Thomas, is at Trades Hall at 3pm on May 6; Glenn Wool's Where is Hell? and Michael Chamberlin and the Ten Commandments are at the Melbourne Town Hall until Sunday; and Pastor Michael Brings Manna from Heaven is at Trades Hall until Sunday.