Articles by Luke Buckmaster

Greg “Fleety” Fleet has remained an unlikely fixture of the Australian stand-up comedy scene for decades, a meandering raconteur whose anecdotes flow thick and fast and often involve unintended mayhem. Fleet’s experience working crowds and getting audiences on side despite risqué material – most notably a surfeit of jokes about being a former heroin junkie [...]

With little cover for sluggish scripts and less for patchy performances, a two person play can go off the rails very quickly. Director Louise Alston’s Sidekicks, starring Dan Ilic and Emily Rose Brennan, has no costumes (with the exception of a tie and a wig) and sets — at least decorated ones — that exist [...]

Luke Buckmaster writes… Having swanned between comedy stages for over two decades, pulling faces and rattling off puns with that distinctive Irish twang, Jimeoin is the sort of comedian relegated to a distant memory: an old TV show, a radio spot, a movie, a poster with his beaming face on it.

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Hinged on one titanic tour de force performance from the mercurial Andrew McClelland, One Man Stand presents eight strikingly different stand-up acts from various spots on the globe, with guests including a bogan Australian, an experimental Russian and a brash overweight American. The twist is, they’re all performed by McClelland. It’s a performance that will slap [...]

The show starts in pitch black as Steven Gates enters the room, lost and crying for help. Alone in a park at midnight sound effects crackle through the speakers. He finds Bob Franklin on stage, who appears to be sitting on a fake leather office chair pilfered from Ikea. Wearing a white doctor’s jacket, Franklin [...]

When ambitious stand-up comedians reach a certain creative threshold, hit a certain high water mark, doing an hour of randomly cobbled together jokes often isn’t enough. They might look for an umbrella theme to hover over their routine, a narrative glue to stick the bits and bobs together — something to elevate the material from [...]

Chris Lilley bounced back into Australian lounge rooms this week in his highly anticipated TV show Angry Boys, a follow-up to the popularly and critically adored one-man-many-characters LOL fests We Can be Heroes and Summer Heights High. Lilley’s appearances on the teev come pre-packaged with a sense of spectacle, a sort of limited-time-only appeal. For [...]

Charles Barrington would like you to believe he’s an international sensation – a well-travelled thespian and raconteur who’s hobnobbed with the rich and powerful and performed in front of many and varied audiences, from legions of fans to armies of critics and, on one particularly unusual occasion, a crowd of ten billion insects. The truth [...]

Moments before Unfinished Business is scheduled to begin, co-star Kieran Eaton fronts the crowd and politely announces that the show will commence a few minutes late. One of the reviewers, he explains, is yet to arrive. “Who cares about the Herald Sun anyway?” he yelps into the microphone. Trouble is, Eaton got it wrong. His [...]

It’s easy – and forever fashionable – to cast one’s gaze back through the haze of nostalgia and remember the world to be a better place way back when. To believe that the streets were safer, the air was a cleaner and 256 colours on a computer monitor was more than enough, thank you very [...]

There is something quintessentially Australian about the performance style of Lawrence Mooney, but pinpointing precisely what is tricky. Like the qualities we equate with a true blue sense of humour, his brand of jocularity is riddled with contradictions: laidback and harsh, earnest and mean, loquacious and blunt, compassionate and misanthropic. A favourite on the festival [...]

No comedy festival lineup is complete without a healthy whack of wise crackin’ Pommy humour, and Doc Brown presents a familiar but endearing shtick: the smooth fast talking “av a laf” middle class Brit. His show Unfamous has a catch: it is in part a hip-hop performance and has been marketed as such. At this [...]

It’s no secret that animation is one of the most laborious and time consuming processes in film production, a hellishly painstaking past time that requires inordinate amounts of time to generate any kind of result. It is therefore a damn shame when good animation is bogged down by clunky writing, because – and Hollywood attests [...]

If every stand-up routine were as wildly verbose as the brick-of-anecdotes-to-your-face style of Melbourne comedian Trav Nash, one gets the sense the craft would either sky rocket to new heights of popularity or collapse like a sick dog in a gutter, saved for brave souls with insatiable appetites for loud and offbeat storytelling. In his [...]