It’s Again Time To Laugh…Again
The Melbourne International Comedy Festival rolls on and this week we experience absurd improv, millennial angst and laidback Welshmen
Before I checked out a show last Tuesday I had a bit of mental seize up. Do you ever wish you wrote down that really interesting/witty thought but you delude yourself into thinking that this, THIS TIME, you’re embarrassingly bad powers of memory would pull through for you. And then it just drifts away. Like pollen.
That thought thankfully returned to me a day later and it wasn’t as insightful or witty as I thought it was. I was not drunk either. I wondered whether anyone did that thing when you get approached by a retail person asking if they can help you with anything and you politely decline, saying you’re just browsing but the polite interaction has frightened you just enough that there’s nothing else for you to do but to leave the store immediately. Or maybe it’s just me.
This is what happened at the Comedy Festival this past week. For me that is. I can’t be everywhere at once (not yet at least). I don’t know about you guys (would it be weird if I did?)
The inescapably intimate set at the Mantra On Russell for Welsh comedian Lloyd Langford that felt like a storyteller at the local pub regaling enraptured and congenial audiences with anecdotes from his life. Langford has a jokes first delivery, not worrying about developing a narrative (apart from a great Christmas and volleyball bit) and focuses on what’s simply going to make people laugh. Like the Dire Straits of comedians.
Headliners at Max Watts. Got a free ticket. Not sure if that’s good or bad press for the Festival. I want to say good? Staff was great, I didn’t get a name, but he didn’t tell me anyway so how would I know (I’m not yet psychic. Or a kleptomaniac). Emmy Blotnick, Jo Firestone, Liza Treyger and Joel Kim Booster were effervescent in that millennial sort of way. As in, a million different things at once — feigning confidence or simply capitulating to it and trying to put on the best possible natural pose we can come up with. Blotnick and Firestone in particular had sets that explored the dark absurdism that swirls at the centre of our lives. Deep at a granular level. Where Amazon reviews are where you go for a fleeting moment of human connection.
Firestone’s impish innocence and crumbling attempts at being social (in front of a live audience) is like the manifestation of all our hopes and fears and the crippling triviality and uncertainty of modern life. And I dare you not to get involved in the game ‘Can you name 25 birds’.
Blotnick mirrored the titanic struggle we (being millennials, and really, to be honest, anyone who feels crushed by the onslaught of this bizarro world we live in) are now so tethered with screens, pop culture, relationships that make you wonder why on earth we try make things work in the first place. But dammit if she isn’t going to enjoy being part of a tea club.
Branching out a little with the improvised, high wire comedy act The Establishment (Dan Lees and Neil Frost) at The Malthouse Theatre. Transforming the entire space into the stage. The audience becomes part of the show. And a willingness forms, a bond if you will, between the duo and the audience. How do you get from bowler hats and the Queens’ English to a subversive, absurd rendition of St George dueling with a dragon? Well you don’t really. There’s no throughline to reach that end point but by jove the leaps from one train of thought to another is fantastically deranged. Having a totally willing audience certainly helps in building a space for duo to run riot in. I ended up a moose that was being hunted by them. They also brought in the Queen, played cricket starting from the Big Bang, conducted multiple game shows, all under the guise of not even starting the show. Lees and Frost revel (or have simultaneous heart attacks) in the unpredictability of the night, leaving as much of the show up in the air for the audience to work with as they do. It leans into a sort of endearing messiness conducted by two drunk puppet masters who mistaking the other’s strings for their own (stay with me on this).
The Festival has just under two weeks to go and these acts plus a heap of others have shows running all the way through to the end. Experience what you can, when you can, and allow a little laughter — be it at ourselves or at nonsensical absurdity — to return to your life.
Times and tickets: https://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2019
