This year at the Melbourne International Comedy festival, a friend and I decided on a few rules to govern our choice of shows: no consulting the program, no big gigs in large venues from well-known performers, and no seeing old favourites. Instead, we decided to hang outside Melbourne Town Hall and listen to pitches from the spruikers handing out leaflets and promoting shows. We would buy tickets to those shows with the most compelling pitches.
On the first Friday night we spent outside the Town Hall, many of the spruikers were aggressively promoting comedians that had very similar-sounding shows – millennial comics sharing horror stories about Tinder, for example. Then we spied the world’s shiest spruiker. She was standing in the shadows away from all the others with her hand meekly extended. No one was taking her flyer.
The flyers were of a poorer quality than the others we had seen, printed on non-glossy paper, like they had been put through a photocopier. She told us she was new to Melbourne – her boyfriend was the comedian whose show she was promoting. Our minds were made up: we would see the show by the comedian boyfriend of the shy spruiker with the home-made flyers.
We walked to the Forum an hour later, but Angus Gordon’s Sad Boy Comedy Hour was sold out. What! This guy was more popular than the spruiker made out. We returned to see him a week later, making sure we secured tickets beforehand, and weren’t disappointed.
Angus Gordon – Sad Boy Comedy Hour
While a lot of comics go for rapid-fire delivery, Gordon’s stories are slowed right down. The Queenslander speaks at a crawl and doesn’t blink, a tic that means that jokes that aren’t necessarily funny in and of themselves often succeed due to the delivery.
He also manages to make gags combining unexpected things like cricket and Marxism, and does a good physical comedy bit about the Brisbane floods. But my favourite piece is his riff on the crime show, Law and Order. In Gordon’s world, the show isn’t about the cops or the criminals, but the cleaners – those that tidy the offices of the Director of Public Prosecutions. It is a long skit, sad and hilarious – and completely original.
• Angus Gordon’s Sad Boy Comedy Hour runs until April 23 at the Forum Theatre
Guy Montgomery – Let’s All Get In a Room Together
After missing out the first time on tickets to see Gordon, we returned to the Town Hall and gravitated towards a tall, laconic guy handing out flyers for his own show. As a spruiker, New Zealander Guy Montgomery was very personable and didn’t seem worked up about whether we went along to his show or not – the run was almost sold out already.
Montgomery doesn’t need a mic in the small, packed and hot room at the Forum, but he has one anyway and speaks into it very loudly. (“We can hear you, dude,” I wanted to say, but I didn’t because people started heckling him quite early on and he didn’t take it too well.)
Some of his stories are bizarre and a bit concerning, such as one involving killing cats. There’s another about being a schoolboy obsessed with Sporty Spice, which beautifully channels all the mad, virginal yearning of New Zealand teenage life. There are also some fairly predictable bits about the differences in cultural ephemera across the ditch.
Some of it is funny, some of it is not. The show may have hung together better if it didn’t slide between observational and surrealist comedy, or if there had been an overarching narrative.
• Guy Montgomery’s Let’s All Get in a Room Together runs until 23 April at the Forum Theatre
Mae Martin – Dope
Mae Martin is a Canadian comic, and she is very funny and unexpectedly moving. She tells dark stories about her history of drug use with a light touch, and is great on obsession and addiction, including her mammoth feelings for Bette Midler. (If a theme is emerging for me from this festival so far, it’s that weird teen crushes are good comic fodder.) Martin’s demeanour is so sunny and sweet it’s hard to imagine her having such heavy drug-related problems in the past.
The performance I saw was signed by an Auslan interpreter – a really great initiative from the Melbourne International Comedy festival. The interpreter is so expressive, and often as hilarious as Martin, that it is almost distracting. On the night I saw Martin perform, the venue was only one third full. She deserves bigger audiences: her show was the tightest and most well paced of all the shows I saw at the festival.
• Mae Martin’s Dope runs until 23 April at Melbourne Town Hall
Aaron Chen – The Infinite Faces of Chenny Baby
We allowed ourselves one recommendation from comedy festival staff: to see Aaron Chen, a young Australian comic.
Aaron’s shtick is the comic equivalent of those teeny tiny meals served at high-end restaurants – he serves up comedy that’s exquisitely observed, small and tasty. The most deadpan of all the comics we saw, Chen is the master of teasing out the excruciating details of everyday life that we can all relate to – like the awkwardness of negotiating personal space on public transport, or the dangers of eating fast food while juggling other tasks.
I highly recommend heading along to his show – or just get spruiked and discover some new favourites.
• Aaron Chen’s The Infinite Faces of Chenny Baby runs until 23 April at Melbourne Town Hall and Victoria Hotel
