Melbourne International Comedy Festival

Festivals are festivals are festivals. I’ve been lucky enough in my time as a stand-up to do several of Australia’s festivals, and have also had the brain cell diminishing pleasure of being involved in the Edinburgh Fringe.

But this isn’t a CV for how much money I’ve lost doing festivals; it’s about the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF). To some degree every festival is the same - you perform in your allotted time, you drink as much around that time as possible, you forget which city or even country you’re in and at the end, the 'friends' you thought you made all leave and the chances of catching up for a coffee before the next festival is about a million to none.

So why even bother writing about the MICF? Because it’s the only festival in the world that for a month takes over a city with one art form, comedy! (Although the Kilkenny and the aptly named Montréal Just For Laughs Festivals are both comedy-focussed, they’re much shorter) What a fantastical idea, let’s put on an arts festival forsaking all other forms of art unless it involves laugh, laugh ha, ha. Brilliant! And takes over the city, it does. There isn’t a corner of Melbourne’s city centre that you can turn down without being hit in the face with comedy. For one month all other things are on hold, shop owners in Chinatown write gags on their abalone and sell them for $10 000 extra, tram warning ‘ding’s, are replaced by the more comical sounding ‘awoogah’s. Our local street dwellers also turn their hand at getting a laugh, replacing “Can I have some small change?” with “Hey C@#T give me ya F@#ckin money!” Oh, how we laugh.

There’s one other distinct difference with Melbourne’s festival - we are in nearly every way at the arse-end of the world. Sometimes I think it is forgotten just how far this great sandy continent/island/country is from... well everything else in the world, but yet this festival still brings in the big guns. Headliners from around the globe make Melbourne their home for a month, wowing audiences with one-liners through to stories beautifully completing this truly international festival. From England to Canada, Japan to New Zealand, South Africa to America, and locally Perth to Brisbane; Melbourne for one month becomes a comedy cauldron of international, interstate and local comedy. Come check it out; Melbourne will be waiting.