My Melbourne Comedy Festival highlights were two acts this year - a duo called "The Underlads" who I had no expectations of. There were only four of us in the crowd and they still killed it. The other was Sam Simmons, the master of random. Both acts heavily featured random-ness and extreme unexpected silliness and I didnt laugh harder than in these two shows in Melbourne. Looking back on the shows I have enjoyed the most at Fringe, they almost all seem to follow these themes. Caroline Mabey, Born in the 80's, The Truth (explained in doodles)...all feature loads of silliness and have all stood out for me. Maybe that says more about me than anything else, but I quite often find I know where a joke is going before I hear it and if I find it predictable it does nothing for me. I'm not alone in this - I spoke with a comedian the other night who said the exact same thing. Repetition of joke types without something new to push it further or add something new now shits me. And I rarely find anything funny the second time around either, so when people quote old jokes or movie stuff over and over, its just not funny. In movies, quite often what makes a quote funny is the character anyway (eg Ron Burgundy or Derek Zoolander etc) so quoting them without the character to back it up just isn't worth anything. BUT with Sam Simmons, the rule about something not being funny twice doesn't seem to count. I had seen Simmons' show "Meanwhile" in Melbs earlier this year and as I said, laughed hard. Its so random, you just don't know what is going to happen next. And seeing it again last night just makes his act/style even stronger for me. He has a commanding stage-presence even if his style is awkward. All his material is based on his stage persona working and I don't think some people would "get" what he is about - looking around the crowd, I could see a number of people who just looked baffled, both at Simmons and at the other people who were doubled over with laughter and that included me at my second viewing of the same material. Hilarious.
After this I went to see a sketch show called by a group called "Casual Violence" in their show "Choose Death". This is the darkest comic material I have seen performed at Fringe and it included a disappointed father on his death-bed, a suicidal "bubble-gun" salesman and a more traditional tragi-comic clown taken to extremes...all very dark stuff done really well by six very talented young blokes, accompanied by a very talented pianist. The clown, while a tragic comic figure that represents the dark heart with a comic exterior, was played so well that women in the audience were actually crying. Fantastic! My favourite was the criminal "Jimmy Bad-legs", an armless mad-man, played with menacing brilliance. Not everyone's cup of tea, but awesome if you like your comedy with a tea-spoon of arsenic.
Daily Show Count : 2
Total Shows Seen: 40
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