Angus Brown and Demi Lardner are Best Good Show

By Elyce PhillipsBest Good Show

Angus Brown and Demi Lardner are off to mortician school! It’s meant to be an adventure, but things take a dark turn when dead bodies start turning up where they shouldn’t. With the cops getting tangled in a web of confusion, it’s down to Angus and Demi to solve the mystery and save the day. Of course, it’s not quite as straightforward as that.

‘Best Good Show’ is at its best goodest when Brown and Lardner stray from the plot and make things weird. A series of bizarre voiceover interludes and repeat appearances from a prejudiced duck added a hilarious layer of absurdity. A sketch about horse divorce reached genius levels of idiocy. The main story gets confusing at times, but you just don’t care – the sketches are that much fun. The writing is witty and clever, yet exudes a childish joy – a well-thought-out variety of stupid.

Brown and Lardner are a fantastic comedic team. They play off each other beautifully and their experience working together really shows. Their banter makes the whole show feel fresh and spontaneous. A couple of tech hiccups throughout the show were handled so deftly, it’s impossible to say whether they were a deliberate part of the show or not. Any moment where things felt like they were going off the rails only added to the mayhem of the hour.

Brown and Lardner have created a show that is perfect for late night. It’s silly, chaotic, a whole lot of fun, and getting a chance to see their sweet dance moves is worth the price of admission alone. ‘Best Good Show’ is a terrific way to finish off a night out at the festival.

Angus Brown and Demi Lardner are Best Good Show is on at The Upstairs Lounge at Little Sista until April 19

http://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2015/season/shows/best-good-show-angus-brown-demi-lardner-are

5 Good REASONS TO SEE Jonestown: GUINEA PIGS

 1. You love weird psychological experiments: We’ve got them all and we’re gonna misrepresent them! We’re the Doctor Phil of comedy!

 2. You put stock in awards and such: We don’t ourselves but, if you’re interested, we were nominated for the Golden Gibbo in 2014 and won the Moosehead in 2015. Not that we’re bragging.

 3. You love a good story: Guinea Pigs has more twists than M Night Shaymalan making a balloon animal Chubby Checker.

 4. You like your comedy like you like your coffee: Black, sweet and injected directly into the anus.

 5. You saw the movies Saw, Cube or Oldboy and thought…this needs more jokes.

 You can see Guinea Pigs at Porland Hotel at 7:15 (6:15 Monday) for the rest of the festival.

For Info & Bookings see the MICF website

http://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2015/season/shows/guinea-pigs-jonestown

 

 

Jonestown – Guinea Pigs

By Lisa Clark Jonestown Guinea pigs

When stand-up/ventriloquist Sarah Jones and standup/magician Nicholas Johnson got together to create the wildly successful Pajama Party it was pretty obvious that they have a fabulous rapport as a comedy team. It’s wonderful to see them build on that as Jonestown with their new Moosehead Awarded show Guinea Pigs.

The show begins with a reassuring fairly traditional opening monologue by Sarah that really highlights what a brilliant standup comedian she is even without her ventriloquist puppets. It settles the audience in and lets us know that we are in safe hands. She is eventually joined by Nick and the show can start going off the conventional rails. We soon learn that while retaining the sense of fun of their first outing, this is more assured and cleverly constructed production with a very different atmosphere. Guinea Pigs is a bit more science-fictiony. The dynamic duo soon find themselves locked in a sealed white room and being experimented on by a sort of villainous but polite looney scientist who is performed by a disembodied voice otherwise know as Andy McClelland.

The experiments carried out such as The Sanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment are apparently famous. There were audible noises of recognition from the audience but I’d not heard of the names of any of them, or Radio-lab (an American radio show/podcast about science) which they referenced. I knew of some of the experiments from descriptions and depictions in the media and other tests such as shock treatment are pretty well known. My ignorance of science did not matter at all because Sarah and Nick know how to entertain the whole audience and it was fun watching social conventions being stripped away as they approached these tests in various silly ways

It was interesting to note the lack of magic or ventriloquism, considering the specialist talents of the performers involved, but they were not missed in a show jam packed with various exciting stunts, genial audience participation, fanciful flashbacks to a fictitious back story and a gorgeous black theatre puppet show. I was slightly disappointed the screen couldn’t have been used a bit more but the wait to find out what it would be used for was certainly well worth it. The end felt a teensy bit wobbly and not quite up to the quality of the strong beginning, but over all the script is well written and the performers are a joy to spend an hour with.

Guinea Pigs in other comedian’s hands might become a Gothic horror sci fi comedy, but with Sarah and Nick things never get too far down the dark path. It’s all fun and games, a bit of a romp with a scifi bent that keeps the audience on side at all times. There is the odd rude word & mild adult reference but this would be an excellent Festival show to take friends or family to, especially families with kids over 16, you’re all bound to have a ball.

Guinea Pigs is on at the Portland Hotel until April 19

http://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2015/season/shows/guinea-pigs-jonestown

Quiet Achievers

By Elyce PhillipsQuiet Achievers

Melbourne has always had a strong improv scene. All year round, there’s a good range of groups you can see in any given week. However, while the nature of improv means you’re getting something different every time, you often see the same games and formats time and time again. So it’s wonderfully refreshing when you can see new, riskier concepts being tried out. In Quiet Achievers, Charlie Sturgeon and Andrew Strano perform completely silent improv, taking inspiration from a randomized selection of 500 music tracks. This is spontaneous comedy stripped down to its basest principles.

Sturgeon and Strano make a great team. Sturgeon has a knack for bringing heart to a scene and often directs stories to unexpected places.  Strano is a fearless and talented physical comic, unfailingly bringing the silly and occasionally getting weirdly sexual. The restriction of communication led to some confusing scenes where it wasn’t entirely clear what was going on, however, Sturgeon and Strano’s performances are strong enough that you’re still laughing, even when you’re baffled. It’s a style of comedy that’s infectiously likeable. Most of the audience got involved at various points in the show, and no-one broke the pact of silence. For that hour, we were all mimes.

One of the great benefits of this show is the fact that the silent performance makes it friendly to the Deaf community – part of a fantastic trend we’re seeing this year of more shows becoming accessible to the hearing impaired.  Quiet Achievers would also be a fantastic pick for non-English speakers. By taking speech out of the equation, Sturgeon and Strano present comedy that is near-universal, drawing on expressions of emotion that we are all familiar with.

Quiet Achievers is a delightfully different show that all fans of improv should go and check out. The performers may be silent, but the laughs are loud.

Quiet Achievers is on at The Tuxedo Cat until April 4

For Tickets and Bookings check the MICF Website:

http://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2015/season/shows/quiet-achievers

Frank Hampster’s Fart Lab

By Colin FlahertyFrank Hampster's Fart Lab

Frank Hampster’s Fart Lab is a show with a bit of an identity crisis. Its subject matter ensures that it’s a hit with kids but it is performed at 8:30pm. It’s almost watershed timeslot suggests that we can expect plenty of ribald toilet humour but being at the Clean Comedy Hub there is only the mere hint at smut. It’s a curious little show indeed!

To appeal to the kids (or kids at heart) there were plentiful sound clips of flatulence, whoopee cushions to play with and lots of treats for those willing to join in the audience participation. For the adult punters, this show is exactly what it says on the tin – monologues about the history of fart jokes, facts about flatulence and many, many jokes about farts – some basic, others quite clever. It certainly attempted to cater for everyone.

There were a few junior night-owls in the audience that I was a part of and it seemed as though Frank was directing the majority of his performance their way in an attempt to hold their interest. Some of the monologues were delivered in a slightly dry manner which not only robbed them of their humorous power but you could see the attention of the little ones waning. They were allowed to run amok, so much so that it threatened to drag Frank away from his scripted material, but he did a good job in maintaining control.

He employed many references of yore and some gentle innuendo in his script that, while tickling the fancy of the mature folk, flew over the kid’s heads. One interesting aspect was that Frank tapped into some school yard nostalgia in the form of juvenile fart jokes and the associated rituals. My inner seven year old chuckled when he recognised these chants of the playground and even learnt some unfamiliar ones used at other schools. The patriotic (possibly seditious) finale was an inspired highlight of silly fun for all.

This performance was an audio / visual extravaganza (thankfully not an odoriferous one) with fart sounds coming thick and fast within a PowerPoint presentation to aid his comedic lecture. A number of clips pulled from the internet provided some chuckles but the random clips from TV and movies were purely excuses for more farts and didn’t particularly aid the jokes.

The advertising pretty much tells you if you’re likely to enjoy this show. If you think that fart jokes are the pinnacle of humour you will have a whale of a time, but if your tastes are more sophisticated you may be left a little cold.

Frank Hampster’s Fart Lab is at The Clean Comedy Hub 

For Tickets and information see the MICF website:

http://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2015/season/shows/fart-lab-frank-hampster

5 Good Reasons why you should see The Umbilical Brothers: KiDSHoW (not suitable for children)

1.  It has singing, storytelling, smiles, happy dancing, fight scenes and murder.

2.  It’ll be even more fun than last year.  And there won’t be any kids there.

3.  If you’re into deconstructive comedy, this is for you.  Not only does it deconstruct theatrical reality and kids’ entertainment, it will deconstruct your sacred inner child and reconstruct it as some kind of messed-up weirdo.

4.  You have a secret desire to see something terrible happen to the Brady Bunch.

5.  You can read.  (See last year’s Squirrel Comedy review of this show.  On second thought, maybe don’t look at it – it contains spoilers.  Trust us, it’s a cracker though)

6.  The Umbilical Brothers are always prepared to go One Better for your pure entertainment.

The Umbilical Brothers: KiDSHoW (not suitable for children) is playing at the Athenaeum Theatre, March 31 to April 5, 6.45 p.m.

See the MICF Website for Bookings and information:

http://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2015/season/shows/kidshow-not-suitable-for-children-the-umbilical-brothers