Download podcast interview link: A Talk with Shaun Micallef
It’s hard not to like the softly spoken giant of Australian comedy that is Shaun Micallef.
He’s had a consistent presence on television screens since the early 90s in Full Frontal, followed over the years by a string of programs including The Micallef P(r)ogram(me), Micallef Tonight, and Newstopia.
Beginning this Friday night on ABC1 is his topical news show Shaun Micallef is Mad as Hell, airing Fridays at 8pm for the next ten weeks. I also had a look at the set of the show, and can tell you that it’s something else. It looks like they’ve raided Don Draper’s living room.
Having one of his busiest years in a long time, Micallef is also appearing in new episodes of veteran variety program Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation (Channel Ten), Laid (ABC1), and filming a drama for broadcast next year called Mr. and Mrs. Murder (Channel 10).
Despite all this, he’s such a nice guy that he spent half an hour on the couch with Laugh Track‘s Matt Smith. No, not like that. But we discussed at length his ABC show Shaun Micallef is Mad as Hell, as well as perspectives on the news, on comedy, on his experience in Who do You Think you are? (SBS), and everything else from Fabio through to a painting on his wall of a dog in a pirate hat.
Filling a 50 minute stand-up show is no easy task. Filling two hours — even with a 20 minute break in the middle — requires absolutely confidence.
First-class British import Ross Noble is choc full of that.
At St Kilda’s gorgeous Palais Theatre Noble schooled his audience with a veritable masterclass of comedy, his trademark spiralling streams of storytelling leading to some of the best audience interaction you’ll see anywhere on the circuit. Read More »
One of the great things about the Melbourne International Comedy Festival is its capacity to act as a circuit breaker for new and undiscovered talent. Anybody can brace the stage and attempt to win over audiences: cough up some dosh, fill out a registration form, book a room and you’re on the program.
There are, however, obvious drawbacks to an uncurated festival. If one show acted as a sobering reminder of them, look no further than Meg Pee’s Close to You, a self-indulgent semi-musical and completely baffling mess in which the performer valiantly comes to terms with her suburban upbringing and (bar a stray giggle or two) shoots a series of blanks.
Mingling Karen Carpenter songs with impersonations of relatives, stories about shared house living and occasional (superfluous) video footage, the show’s cyclical structure focuses most prominently on re-enactments of Pee’s grandmother, performed as a stereotypical ocker old lady from yesteryear. Read More »
A variety of characters, a range of skits, an imaginative premise, a range of accents, and a damn good impression of Robert De Niro doing an impression of Chewbacca the Wookiee – all provided by comedian Xavier Michelides.
It’s a conventional premise that could have made a decent show by itself, but it’s kicked to the next level with the overarching theme it’s based around.
Michelides’ show opens a window into his mind, in an effort to see how it works and how he thinks. The skits unfold and demonstrate concepts and abstract ideas, dreams and reality, and after a while all gets rather meta. Read More »
Comedy once again comes to confines of the Melbourne Museum, as the Melbourne Museum Comedy Tour takes it to open dance warfare between science and history.
Now in its fifth year, the tour is a breezethrough of some of the highlights of the Melbourne Museum – primarily the stuffed animals exhibit and the Melbourne history exhibit – shepherded by the comedic tour guides Ben McKenzie, Dave Lamb and Petra Elliott. Read More »
This year’s Crikey ‘Best of the Fest’ award for the best show in the 2012 Melbourne International Comedy Festival was presented last night to a comedian that we had no trouble agreeing on – Andrew McClelland.
From left: Luke Buckmaster, Andrew McClelland and Matt Smith
Read More »
There’s no doubt that the Axis of Awesome know what they’re doing. Now entering their sixth year as a musical comedy trio, they play to sell out audiences around the world, and their ‘Four Chords’ song have been seen by an impressive amount of people on YouTube.
By now there’s probably a fair few comedy fans in Melbourne who have seen one of their shows.
If you’re one of them, you’ll be relieved to know that as you try to cram as many shows as you can into the final week, Axis of Awesome have delivered one that you can safely give a miss. Read More »
It’s true that every festival show is different, every performer unique. But after notching up double digits on the comedy festival tally sheet it’s almost impossible not to feel a sense of déjà vu.
You hear a lot of jokes about belonging to a particular race, a lot of jokes about jaded ex-lovers, a lot of jokes about shared house living, getting old, staying young, going to work, remaining unemployed…
Those feeling pangs of festival familiarity could do well, very well, to refresh the palette with some good ol’ fashioned sketch comedy c/o a trio of 20-something comics in the breezy smile-stamping romp Wing Attack! – PANTS (Pants). Read More »
Hannah Gadsby is excellent in this show that probes gender stereotypes and points out the raw deal that women have had over the centuries when it comes to marriage, sex, equality and pretty much everything else.
There is a political message here, but Gadsby handles it with aplomb and with plenty of humour. Hannah Wants a Wife is not really about Hannah wanting a wife at all, and this was a pleasant surprise – the show ranged far beyond gender stereotypes of marriage.
Gadsby studied Art History at Australian National University in Canberra, and she puts her knowledge of and interest in art to good use. There’s a copy of a 15th century Flemish painting on stage, which turns out to be central to her performance. Read More »
Loosely tied to a sprawling story line about venturing into the world of professional boxing, 24-year-old up-and-comer Tegan Higginbotham gives a literal twist to “punch lines” in Million Dollar Tegan, a comedy show companion piece to Clint Eastwood’s 2004 boxing drama – and thankfully a great deal more amusing.
Whether Higginbotham jumped in the ring purely for comedic material or a bash-heavy self-improvement session is uncertain, but great comedy – particularly comedy with an emphasis on storytelling – is undoubtedly boosted by life experience, and she has some sweat infused tales to tell. Some carefully placed video footage – perhaps in a bigger room than the closet upstairs at the Spleen Bar – could have worked wonders. Read More »
Six people take to the stage in something that is technically not a play, blatantly not on the radio, but still has all the hallmarks of trying something a little different. Bullet takes a moment to adjust to, but it works, and it’s a fun ride.
and it brings the trappings of a 1940s television serial from the screen, through the radio, to the stage.
Bullet tells the story of a superhero which covers everything such a story is expected to – he fights villains, suffers losses, and overcomes challenges. The story is told by six skilled voice actors with theatrical flair, and aided by an impressive range of sound effects. Read More »
Warrick Glynn writes…
Bob has re-entered the building and he’s brought his mojo with him. I knew Bob was back when he burst onto the stage of the campy Spiegeltent in his ‘Pepsi Max’ tracksuit and Jack Vidgeon hairdo and launched into the first of his twenty golden greats.
Looking like the cover model for a K-tel compilation album, Bob Downe sang and danced his way through a collection of kitsch classics that had ‘em singing along to every embarrassing lyric. I felt like it was Saturday night at Aunty Betty’s place, circa 1973, and I’d been allowed to stay up with the grown-ups to drink beer, play records and watch The Penthouse Club on Channel 7. Read More »
It’s hard to say whether the descriptor ‘jazz-infused comedy’, as listed on the Comedy Festival website, really does The Horne Section any justice. It’s best to state now that such a description fails to encapsulate this show at all, the heady, delicious juggernaut that it is. The Horne Section doesn’t really attempt to be anything other than a bit of fun, so if you like staying in your comfort zone, it’s not going to blast you into uncomfortable territory.
Six gentlemen in bright pink shirts and black suits walk up on stage and prepare their instruments – piano, bass guitar, drums, saxophone, trumpet, and for lead singer Alex Horne, the microphone. And what a talent that man has for making his audience swoon under the hypnotic silliness of his dorky tomfoolery. Read More »
Nobody needs to point out that cracking into the comedy scene is a tough grind. Stand-up comedians generally start by refining their acts in dingy low-lit rooms, adding and cutting material until a they have a reliable stable of gags, but there’s a world of difference between filling a ten minute spot with eight other comics versus entertaining an audience for an hour.
One way to break into the festival scene without the burden of filling so much time is buddying up with a fellow newcomer. This is the path treaded by 20-year-old law student Amos Gill and 21-year-old architecture student Moataz Hamde, who divvy a 50 minute show into halves and make a pretty good fist of it.
Both acknowledge they have limited life experience and predictably cover things they know — like footy, chicks and their parents. Read More »
Imaan Hadchiti’s wicked 2011 show, A Little Perspective, was a tantalising promise to the audience that this little guy (at something like 3-foot-nothing in height) had a crazy knack for bulldozing people who patronised him for being a ‘little person’.
So it was with keen interest that I approached his latest offering, Bigger Than Jesus, only to be disappointed by an unstructured, wandering, poorly planned attempt to inject a different flavour into a routine that already worked so well.
It wasn’t broken, but Imaan tried to fix it. Read More »
Nicole Humphreys writes…
With a commanding stage presence and voice to match, McQueen’s candid comedy cabaret floats between an open diary of her work in theatre, to transformations into her ‘guest stars’ – where McQueen does her best work.
Cleverly written songs about the pitfalls of being a single woman in an industry that is swimming with gay men, are followed by some slower ones and McQueen almost falls into the traps of typical female-comedian humour – PMS, being single and motherhood. Read More »
Random, improvised and hilarious: that’s Akmal at this year’s festival.
Every show I’ve seen so far at the 2012 Melbourne International Comedy Festival has had, at some level, thematic coherence or a narrative arc. So Akmal’s show came as a bit of a surprise, because coherence of any sort is not the way he rolls – unless you count the regular use of four-letter words.
There’s plenty of audience engagement with punters in the front row, something that Akmal returns to throughout the show. Watching him draw an answer out of an unwilling audience member is funny in itself, and he does incredibly well turning limited material into comedy – usually at the audience member’s expense. Read More »
With a bubbly, infectious presence and an innocent on stage charm, Shappi Khorsandi presents an interesting, but at times traumatic portrayal of family life to this year’s comedy festival.
Flanked at all times on stage by the titular family photo, Khorsandi tells about her childhood – first in Iran, and later in England, her experiences growing up with her brother, and now her time as a mother and the kind of wisdom (or damage) she is imparting on her son.
Telling family stories seemed to be a comfortable safe zone for Khorsandi, and it suited her style well. It made for a rather safe show, and the few times it took a darker turn she frowned at the audience and chided us for laughing – probably tongue in cheek, but her gentle comedy style was effective regardless. Read More »
Hayley Brennan embodies the stereotypes of Gen Y, blonde and party girl. She seems to exploit these types intentionally, but I suspect she’s not fully aware of the messages she’s sending.
Brennan introduces her show by explaining that the next hour is about everyone getting to know one another. Thankfully, she exercises the Gen Y stereotype at this point by saying that this means she will tell the audience all about herself – there’s no need for us to return the favour.
Brennan’s show uses plenty of self-deprecating humour as well as talking about her promised obsessions of Harry Potter and Facebook. She is of the age where these two phenomena came along at exactly the right time, and the regular sprinkling of Harry Potter jokes are amusing. Read More »
In terms of comedy that’s organised around a theme, Ryan Walker’s Man Up! takes a particularly personal approach. His show is a tale of past woes that have come back to haunt him, thanks to his upcoming ten-year high school reunion and the unpleasant memories this evokes.
Ultimately this is a show about bullying, and in that regard there’s a fairly strong message here. The crux of the story lies in betrayal by a mate over a girl many years ago (though not in the way you might think), an experience that haunts Walker and his relationship with women to this day. Read More »
You don’t get to stick around as a stand-up comedian for as long as Tom Gleeson has and still draw a sizable crowd without being good at what you do.
Tom Gleeson’s show this year plays out like a textbook example of a funny, if generic, comedy show.
It starts off with some audience interaction, tries out some pretty decent material, there’s a bit of a lull towards the end when he resorts to reading out an article he’s written for The Australian, finally slowly building up to a memorable finish. Read More »
In this podcast, Matt Smith talks to Simon Taylor about his comedy festival show 10 Things I Know About You, his podcast Manthropology, and what makes people tick.
Podcast: A Talk with Simon Taylor
Simon Taylor in 10 Things In Know About You is on at the Butterfly Club, Tuesday, Wednesday, Sunday at 8pm, Thursday – Saturday at 9pm, until April 22nd.
There were a few comedians this comedy festival dusting off their computers and tapping away to present their audience with a Powerpoint presentation. So far they’ve been little more than a poorly integrated visual aid, a vaguely tedious distraction that did little but invoke the feeling that you were trapped in a business meeting that you paid entry for.
Dave Gorman’s Powerpoint Presentation could have gone this way, but instead it adds something special to the mix. ‘Presentation’ hardly does it justice. His stand-up is quality stuff – ranty, emotional, neurotic material. Add to this a well produced, visually stimulating powerpoint presentation. It isn’t just a visual aid or mental cues, it adds an extra layer to the comedy. Read More »
With the motor mouth and unfettered energy of a true extrovert, Felicity Ward is a loud and boisterous comedian with a habit of following incongruous jokes by looking at the audience with an expression of “did I just say that?” stamped across her beaming countenance.
If she wasn’t wary of audience interactions before this year’s festival, she is now. Things got hairy during an early performance of The Hedgehog Dilemma when Ward invited a young man “with a killer fringe” onto the stage and asked him to read a script — with a lisp. Read More »
You have to hand it to Tommy Dassalo – he set himself a challenge with his comedy festival this year.
At first Dassalo states that his show is about the trials and heartache of a long distance relationship, and it lives up to that. Tommy’s girlfriend moved to Disneyland to sell glowsticks, and this is something that proves quite challenging.
But before you think that it might be a depressing, self involved piece of scrawl better confined to a blogspot, he throws a curveball, delving into the comedy goldmine that is childhood cancer. Read More »
Pajama Men have a strictly limited run of their show from last year, The Middle of No One, and Crikey’s Laugh Track has two free tickets to give away for the show on Wednesday 18th April.
I don’t need to tell you how good the show was, Crikey has a review handy. Click here to read what Vince Chadwick had to say about it.
If you’re interested in the tickets, go and ‘like’ Laugh Track on Facebook, and email your name and a contact number to matt@endofthespectrum.net.
The Pajama Men in The Middle of No One is on at 7:30pm, Princess Theatre, 17 – 21 April.
Me Pregnant! has very little to do with actually being pregnant. It features only in the beginning, when the story revolves around the monstrous survivor of a doomed litter and their mother.
The person who led some terrorised villagers to slay the beast ends up living a life of isolation and despair after the villagers turn on her when things don’t go back to perfect living after the death of the monster.
It’s a weird, twisted affair with numerous creepy characters and the usual mandatory modern references, only in this case it’s to stuff like Le Snak biscuit-and-cheese packs and answering telephones in full medieval attire. Me Pregnant! doesn’t really takes itself too seriously, thank goodness, because it makes the peculiar storyline easier to swallow. Read More »
Salacious London-based duo East End Cabaret, starring Bernadette Byrne (played by Jennifer Byrne) and Victor Victoria (played Victoria Falconer-Pritchard), is up there with the crème-de-la-crème of musical acts at this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Featuring a cavalcade of raunchy songs with names like It Was Still Hard and Danger Wank, it’s clear early in the show that nothing is off limits for these two gifted and irreverent performers.
Byrne is lead vocalist and Victor Victoria, a hermaphrodite sporting a smashing half man/half woman costume, plays a range of instruments (and vocals) including accordion, violin, piano and kazoo. Featuring the kind of audience interaction destined to give male participants night tremors for decades, the show is a riot – a sort of high-powered feminine Flight of the Conchords with the smut cranked up to 11. As the end of their Melbourne season approaches (show details can be found here) I interviewed the prurient pair about the sub-textual meaning of Danger Wank, confronting conservative crowds and playing in venues such as converted toilets and railway tunnels. Read More »
Some of the pleasures of progressive stand-up comedy arise from the comic’s ability to push boundaries, explore social taboos and judge how far they can nudge audiences out of their comfort zones without losing them.
Whether the crowd laugh along to jokes they might never make themselves or shake their heads in disgust isn’t so much a question of content but whether they like the person delivering it.
Loquacious neo hipster Simon Keck — who rocks thick-rimmed glasses as deep as they are wide and apparently doesn’t own shoes — gets away with a lot because he’s likeable. Read More »
Sammy J and (purple puppet) Randy are back for yet another round at the Comedy Festival with The Inheritance. There’s singing, some sword-fighting, creepy caretakers, ghosts and some ‘fully sick’ songs about subwoofers.
Watching a show featuring Sammy J and Randy is like meeting someone who’s overdone the plastic surgery – there’s a little too much to look at. The speed can sometimes be frenzied, but it doesn’t make for an unpleasant experience. Songs are used as a hyperactive reprieve from the zipping storyline rather than as a tool to advance it. Read More »
The setup is a man-date between two socially awkward gents. They begin in undies, change into clothes and the show – well, play – takes place around a small two person table as they make chit-chat and wait for their meal.
It’s obvious from early on that David Quirk and Benn Bennett haven’t thought much further ahead than that.
Apparently they went on dozens of real-life man-dates to help prepare for their on stage tete a tete, which, if true, and going by the results on display, would have generated some of the worst dinner table conversation since humankind developed the power of speech. Read More »
Musical comedy group Dead Cat Bounce return to Australian shores this year, a member lighter but no less funnier, with their newest hard rock show Howl of the She-Leopard (a title they came up with by using a pretty damn accurate ‘rock concert name’ formula).
There’s as much comedic talent as there is musical with this trio on stage, and it’s easy to imagine that they could comfortably lay a claim to both.
For those who have seen dead cat bounce previously, a few classic songs made a welcome return, such as Rugby and Christians in Love. Read More »
Mark Butler is undoubtedly the thinking man’s comedian – funny goes hand in hand with knowledge, and his shows are carefully crafted and minutely researched to draw every joke out of a topic.
While in the past he’s taught us about sex and grammar (two separate shows), this festival he explores the concepts of lying. Why do we do it, how do we do it, and how can you notice it?
Bouncing on to the stage with the mood setting backing music of Charles and Eddie’s ‘Would I Lie to you’, Butler quickly took command of an eager audience. In the opening two minutes, he points out the four lies he’s already told, beginning with what a great audience we are. Read More »
His collar is up, his shirt is untucked, his “arrr me hearties” dress sense seems to belong to a pirate ship, he speaks with a thick British accent and his eyes are wide and buggy, with heavy bags hanging beneath them.
Tim FitzHigham looks and sounds like he arrived not just from a different place but a different time, as if he fell into a Sliders portal and was spat out at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival circa 2012.
His show Gambler is about wacky wagers, an ode to the age-old tradition of placing a monetary value on inconsequential events and challengers. Read More »
Last year festival favourite Lawrence Mooney pretended to struggle to write a comedy show in the self-reflexive rib tickler An Indecisive Bag of Donuts (winner of Crikey’s Best of the Fest award), an hour of comedy so good it deserved to be recorded, put inside an indestructible flying server drone and shot into space to secure its posterity lest humanity meet an apocalyptic punch line – and to demonstrate to any extraterrestrials what the former residents of Planet Earth meant by “great comedy.”
The rabble rousing raconteur returns, a high powered comedic mutant (to paraphrase Hunter S Thompson) too funny to live and too rare to die, to regale audiences with a nostalgia-tinged collection of stories and anecdotes about living in Australian suburbia. Read More »
