Comfest

With the Melbourne International Comedy festival well under way, I still have nearly all the shows I’ve booked for to come!

I attended my first show solo on Tuesday night, ‘Edinburgh Festa Besta’, featuring three comedians who have performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The MC for the evening, a Teddy someone, was not to my taste and I also noticed many of the audience looking clueless when he was pausing for laughter. In an all male show, the first one out was Dave Grant, and a Melbourne bloke who based many of his jokes around a recent trip to Darwin – with much success, a very amusing guy! As Teddy announced a short break and warned everybody to be back in time for the next act, I was shocked to hear it was Nik Coppin. Being friends with Toni, I’ve heard endless comments about him and have been eagerly awaiting his arrival at Comfest. Having booked a ticket for this, I also booked one to his solo show next week, not knowing he’d be at the Festa Besta! When he emerged I was relieved to find he is fantastic, very entertaining with a fresh look on the world – including his home country of England, and thankfully not in a pompous, arrogant way that so many do. So that was fantastic, and I was left to eagerly look forward to the ‘headliner’. Unfortunately, an American with a poor sense of humour (and dress sense) emerged and I was left to half-heartedly laugh my way through it, with just a few good giggles to be had.

Comedians make most of their work from making amusing observations of life and the world around them, often exaggerating them or delivering them in a comical way. Unfortunately he’d missed Comedy Class 101 and simply made the observations and relayed them to us in a rather unfunny and overly American way – very in-your-face, me Tarzan, you Jane way. But as the great singer Meat Loaf tells us, two out of three ain’t bad!

Next up I have Josh Thomas over the weekend, which is the ‘biggest’ name I’ve gone for. Following that, Nik Coppin’s full solo show and a Finnish comedian called Antti Hakala who has some good reviews. I may end up going to a couple others, but it’ll be spur of the moment and probably due to my housemates or friends telling me who we need to see - they’re all much more clued up on comedy. Hopefully this’ll keep me giggling away for a little while at least!