Clara Cupcakes : Aspic – The Joys of Gelatinous Cooking & Home Maintenance: The Ultimate Guide to Womanhood

By Colin Flaherty

Perfect housewife and best selling author Clara Cupcakes has hit the big time landing her own television show. As part of the studio audience, we witness the pilot episode featuring, hopefully, famous guests and various gelatinous creations.

This is on odd period piece. Advertised as being set in 1974 with the Women’s Liberation Movement in full swing in the background somewhere. Our host however seems to be stuck in the 1950s in both appearance and demeanour, oblivious that full time housewife is a role that’s kinda on the way out. 2025 also kicks its way into this reality as we delight in Clara dealing with modern attitudes while interacting with the audience and looking confused when the younger folk fail to understand her references.

The world of Clara Cupcakes is a strange and often terrifying place. The repeated attempts at fetching her aspic masterpiece features creepy lighting and a loud visceral reaction from Clara. A number of surreal sequences left me scratching my head trying to understand the logic of it all. There was likely some symbolism I didn’t pick up on or the randomness is simply there to keep us on our toes.

Repetition plays a major role in the show with concepts often pushed to breaking point. A disturbing burlesque routine-cum-advertorial goes on and on and gets messier and messier until Clara is an exhausted wreck. Kitschy musical interludes introducing each segment play for slightly too long as we giggle watching her awkwardly dance along.

The larger than life Clara is a whirlwind of energy on stage. Everything is done in a hilarious frenzy and the props end up all over the place. She throws herself into silly mimes and some laughably bad impressions. When she does slow down, it’s to portray her wonderfully droll Grandmother with her indeterminate European accent.

She can be a rather monstrous character with terse exchanges when punters fail to perform the exact task to her vague gestures or correctly respond to her prompts. The increasing list of guests, each with someplace better to be, pushes her to breaking point before she explodes and lays bare the artifice of the show with some cheeky jibes at the theatrical world. There are several tragic tales from her family providing some darkness to the light and garnering empathy towards her.

Being the second show of the run, it was a little rough around the edges. We laughed at the obvious errors happening and not all the jokes landed. These are things that will be ironed out as the season progresses but it is already a fascinating show.

Aspic – The Joys of Gelatinous Cooking & Home Maintenance: The Ultimate Guide to Womanhood is on at The Motley Bauhaus until April 20

https://www.comedyfestival.com.au/browse-shows/aspic/

Frankie McNair & Isaac Haigh – The Booth Variety Spectacular & Formal Apology Hour!

By Peter Hodgson

One of the great pleasures of the past few years of Australian comedy has been watching the rise and rise of Frankie McNair. Frankie’s standup? Hilarious. Frankie’s improv? Virtuosic. So when I saw the first hints of what would become Tabitha Booth, I was already all-in. Tabitha has been described as ‘a heavily medicated lounge singer’ that’s probably the best place to start. Tabitha’s in-universe lore includes a stint on a classic sitcom as Long Fork Lady, a prop comedy character stretched (ha!) to the limits, forever trying to break free from a one-gag character that the pubic just won’t let go of. That’s where we found Tabitha at last year’s festival: living in the present day, trying to claw back her identity outside of a lady with a comically long telescoping fork. This year Tabitha takes back to 1969 for The Booth Variety Spectacular & Formal Apology Hour!, placing us right there in the studio as Tabitha bids a bittersweet farewell to her televised variety show.

This is a much bigger production than McNair has previously presented, with a bigger stage, more props, a bigger cast and more stuff, and it also introduces audiences to Isaac Haigh, Tabitha’s TV sidekick and soon-to-be replacement, all warm rapport and Ray Martin hair. Now, there’s a version of this show on YouTube in the form of a fundraising live special for the Tabitha Booth YouTube series The Telling Of The Untold Truth Of Tabitha Booth, and it’s hilarious. But I’m glad I waited until after seeing the MICF version before watching it because Haigh’s character has morphed between then and now as a more sympathetic one. He’s more mindful of Tabitha’s feelings even while taking her job. We don’t see him as someone who is trying to edge her out, but someone who is seizing his career moment just as she would have. It makes Tabitha’s story more tragic: despite all her chemical and emotional freakouts, it’s not really a case of Tabitha losing her TV gig so much as TV just moving on without her.

Special shout-out goes to Matt Jenner, who for most of the show plays a harried stagehand but who also makes an appearance as the human embodiment of the Long Fork itself. His energy as the fork is utterly chaotic in the most Tabitha-appropriate ways and it really helps to land the show’s ending. The variety show format also allows for guest appearances every night: the evening I attended included Maddy Weeks as a recently divorced ventriloquist whose wife even took the doll.

This show may be set in 1969 but 2025 is definitely Tabitha’s year. Between The Telling Of The Untold Truth of Tabitha Booth and the Booth Variety Spectacular & Formal Apology Hour, McNair is really afforded the chance to go deep with Tabitha, to see what the character will do when placed in different situations in different eras. There’s so much potential. And given that McNair had already established a comic voice prior to arriving at Tabitha, it’s unlikely that they’ll become typecast as just ‘The Long Fork Lady Lady.’

The Booth Variety Spectacular & Formal Apology Hour! Is playing until April 20

https://www.comedyfestival.com.au/browse-shows/the-booth-variety-spectacular-formal-apology-hour/

 

Mish Wittrup – Off With Her Head!

By Peter Hodgson

You only get one chance to make a first impression. We can’t control what people remember about us. To most of us, Mish Wittrup is a talented comedian, writer and and podcaster who has won the Melbourne International Comedy Festival’s Best Newcomer Award in 2022 and who brightens up any Aunty Donna project she’s involved in. But to Google, her first notable achievement was …okay, how do I say this without spoiling it? Let’s just say it was something private and sex-adjacent and it happened back at uni.

After reeling from the pure mortification of this discovery, Mish uses it as a springboard to examine her sense of self and to look at the various hats she’s worn in her life. Off With Her Head! takes us on a tour of the different core values Mish has taken on in her journey to find out who she truly is, outside of the context of the person who did that stuff at house parties at uni. Is she a lover? A fighter? Can she lock down a crush who looks like everyone’s favourite early 2000s rock star? Can she cut it as a scholarship student in the horrifying world of private school? This fast-paced show takes us on a Powerpoint-aided exploration of the postmodern psyche, like those memes of Charlie from Always Sunny piecing a mystery together with photos, maps and red string. It’s all there: call centres, Rubik’s Cubes, Chris Pine, the intricacies of corporate procurement, even a big musical number.

This is only Wittrup’s fourth year in comedy but it sure doesn’t feel like it. She has that unique ability to make an entire audience feel like we’re all mates at a party, but the writing, direction and multimedia components keep the show moving forward. It may have taken Wittrup a while to find live comedy but clearly she belongs here.

Mish Wittrup – Off With Her Head! Has added extra shows! It’s playing April 11 and 12 at The Greek.

https://www.comedyfestival.com.au/browse-shows/mish-wittrup/

Sam Garlepp – Scam Garlepp

By Bella Jones

You might know Sam Garlepp as a writer for The Hundred and The Cheap Seats (as well as appearing on the latter) but if you work at Coles you’ll definitely know him from the internal training videos.

From Facebook Marketplace to divorced parents, in Scam Garlepp Sam covers it all. This show is really tight and the addition of some tech only adds to what is such a delightful and more than laugh minute almost-hour of comedy.

Garlepp quickly comes across as relatable and seemingly effortlessly moves from straight stand up to tech to song parodies – the crowd takes particular joy in a rework of ‘Please Please Please’ to be about the perils of board game nights.

His style is such that he has no trouble balancing quick quips with callbacks and the occasional move into darker jokes – this show isn’t political by any means but an apt comparison of comedy show flyers to political flyers draws a big laugh.

Sam Garlepp is a seriously talented performer and this show could be his best work yet!

Sam Garlepp performs the rest of his run of Scam Garlepp at QT Melbourne from April 16 – 20

https://www.comedyfestival.com.au/browse-shows/scam-garlepp/

 

Jin Hao Li – Swimming In A Submarine

By Lisa Clark

There are no bells and whistles. No props, no soundscape, just Jin, his mic and his voice. Having walked around the room gently asking “Are you OK?” to all his seated audience members as more entered (and it was PACKED!) Jin opens with “I was walking through a forest…” and off he goes and doesn’t let up.

Jin is not one to tell long form funny stories or to try to find meaning in his life through comedy, Swimming In A Submarine is all jokes, jokes, jokes. He tells short stories and jokes that seem to be about one thing but turn out to be about something else, it’s all about misdirect and surprise. There’s no political point or message, Jin talks a lot about various kinds of animals and dream sequences and imagining scenarios like joining the yakuza, often seeming to gently meander and then will surprise with a punchy U-turn.

Jin can be quite aggressive with his crowd work, tending to use the crowd work as a sort of sounding board rather than a genuine part of the show. But the jokes keep rolling and the audience loves him. Quite a few of his jokes are broken up and sprinkled throughout the show but there is no overarching theme. Other jokes teeter on the edge of distasteful or rude but he gets away with them with a cheeky grin.

It’s not surprising that Jin was nominated for Best Newcomer at the Edinburgh Festival, Swimming In A Submarine is packed with jokes and his audience is packed to the rafters with laughing punters.

Jin Hao Li performs Swimming In A Submarine at The Chinese Museum until April 18

Jenny Tian – Jenny’s Travels

By Colin Flaherty

Jenny’s Travels follows Jenny Tian as she embarks on a rite of passage for many comedians, leaving the rather limited career opportunities of Australia behind to seek their fortunes overseas. A long held wish to visit the United States was hit with administration issues and a pandemic which eventually led to her moving to London. We travel with her via this collection of amusing stories.

The anecdotes themselves cover familiar topics of people leaving the nest that makes them immensely relatable. We hear of her very protective mother’s disapproval of her heading to such a dangerous place. A story of settling for a peculiar housemate will click with everyone who has cohabited with a weirdo.

The show sometimes drifts off on asides that have a logic to them as they often clarify the main story. Others tales are inserted just for the hell of it, such as her need to explain why she’s freezing her eggs. Similarly an extended routine about intimate encounters feels a little shoehorned into the narrative but wins over the crowd regardless with its titillating shock of such racy material coming from the mouth of this nice young woman.

Audience interaction at the top of the show asks if anyone has moved their lives overseas. This resulted in some fascinating information from a gentleman who’d moved to Australia from North Korea via South Korea on this particular night. She added some witty quips but didn’t go much deeper. This seems as if it will have the same impact if it had just been a rhetorical question. Perhaps modern audiences have been trained to expect some crowd work in every show.

Jenny is a delightful performer who keeps the audience entranced throughout. This is a solid hour of storytelling stand up that has won over many fans as the packed Saturday night show, will attest.

Jenny’s Travels is on at the Melbourne Town Hall until April 20

https://www.comedyfestival.com.au/browse-shows/jenny-s-travels/