Melbourne Comedy Festival

Every year in Melbourne for the past 21 years, between the end of March to mid-April a massive Comedy Festival takes place for 3 and half weeks. It is the 3rd largest Comedy festival in the world. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Montreal's Just for Laughs Festival being the other two biggies.

All over the city any venue (hotel, bar, pub, café, restaurant, lounge, club, church, library, theatre, hall, gallery, football club, museum, cinema, town hall, arts centre and university) capable of hosting a show is used to show all the acts that come to Melbourne. In total there are 101 venues showing 291 acts; that range from stand-up to improve, theatre, singing and dancing. Also there are shows that cater to children.

The main aim of the Festival is to:

• showcase and celebrate the best of Australia's comic artists
• nurture and develop new comic performers and comedy works
• present the finest overseas comedians to Australian audiences

Last year Lauren and I attended one show. We did not find him very funny and I will not mention the comic. But he is hailed by critics and other comedians for his comedy.

Bad Comedy

This year I have seen 2 acts, one horrible and one great. I won free tickets to see a preview of Sam Bowring for his stand-up gig More Irrelevant Bullshit. I didn’t find it very funny and at the end of the show found myself coma-like and needed to be re-awakened. It was Bullshit. Although to be fair there was a group of people who found him funny.

Good Comedy

That same night, 30 minutes later we saw a sketch and improv group. I was looking forward to seeing this group as they hail from the great city of Toronto. Their name is Toronto on Top and they were presenting a show called Toronto Goes Down!

Finally something funny, the sketches they did at times were gut-busting funny and had me laughing. They restored my faith in there being funny people at the Comedy Festival.

Toronto on Top feature 5 Canadians and 1 Australian, featuring 3 women and 3 men in their 20’s or 30’s. Their comedy is very broad and features pop-culture references to TV shows and Movies.After their one hour performance, they did about 15-20mins of improv which was also funny. I highly recommend seeing them.

Toronto On Top - www.torontoontop.com

Melbourne Comedy Festival - www.comedyfestival.com.au