Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

The finalists in the nationwide Raw Comedy talent hunt seem to get stronger each year, but even so, it seemed clear that Henry Yan was the stand-out winner from the 2023 batch.

The Melbourne local seemed most at ease in front of the 1,400-strong crowd, fully using the stage and exuding a genuine delight to be there, yet happy to ‘muck around’ on his biggest gig yet, giving a shout-out to his parents.

He has a winningly odd energy, slightly awkward and nerdy but owning it with confidence, while being apparently entertained by his own gags, chuckling infectiously along with the rest of us. Many a beta comedian will jokingly claim gangsta credentials they don’t have, but Yan’s take hits the spot.

Most notably, though, he committed half of his set to a routine about towels, showcasing his distinctively quirky sense of humour and ability to wring – no pun intended – every angle from a premise. It felt as if he could easily have done twice his allotted time slot.

Yan’s set came midway though the final, hosted by Dilruk Jayasinha and  kicked off by Jarryd Prain, a camp gay comic who admitted to picking some ‘low-hanging fruit’ with his overfamiliar double entendres. Once he moves away from such predictable, stereotypical material and presentation, he shows more invention in a short routine about jury duty, and an endearing desperation when he talks about his moribund dating life.

Calm and confident Hadi Kilman has a lot to offer, starting with effective gags about his name and his Lebanese background, displaying just a glimmer of edge when touching briefly on racism. He was a little less assured in talking about getting laid off from his job in Canada, and talk of Queenslanders overrunning the Rockies ski resort of Banff seemed a little niche, but he won it back with a great one-liner about body image.

Ginny Hollands offers an appealing mix of being cheerful yet sardonic, talking about how she uses her visual impairment – she has just 16 per cent of her sight – as a useful, unchallengeable excuse for bad behaviour. Her cynicism also turned around a routine about dating that started blander. She has other gears too, with a more honest bit about the vulnerability of doing stand-up in front of people you love – although the thoughtfulness is punctured by a cheap but effective gag.

Nicole Shi embraced some stereotypes about Asian people, with effective and blunt punchlines fully leaning into misplaced Western expectations. Cheeky references to the repressive regime back at home have bite and playfulness and her attempt at pronouncing the word ‘Australian’ just like a native of this island is a delight. A couple cheap sex gags lowers her strike rate, but wrapping biting gags into a soft demeanour is an effective technique that gives her a solid base to build upon.

Tasmania’s Jack O’Sullivan seemed a bit more nervous, and his material about his tinnitus, while interesting, went too long between punchlines. The central idea about the noise drowning out the voices in his head is a decent one, but needs to be developed and tightened.

Jacquelyn Richards displayed a more skilful way of mining a single subject for laughs – and it was a deep and dark one: the recent death of her husband.  That grief is so hard to deal with means so many clichés have grown up around the subject, from asking ‘if there’s anything I can do…’ to asserting ‘it’s what he would have wanted’. Where there’s a cliché, there’s a gag to undermine it, and Richards finds plenty.

She has eked much out of this fertile ground, especially when leaning into the latitude that grief gives her not to have to be nice to people. Deservedly, she took a runners-up slot.

Joining her on the rostrum was Rapha Manajem, a German-Jewish-Arabic comic who made the most out of his complex family tree, dryly noting how many of its branches have historically wanted to eliminate the others.

Encounters with racist cab drivers are a comedy staple, but Manajem’s hugely unusual background gave him the edge in his story, which he regaled with vim and a winningly light touch on big topics. And he was confident enough to kick off his big opportunity with a bit of crowd work.

The running order turned out to offer three strong acts – and three runners-up – on the bounce. It was unfortunate Meg Jager started out joking that she was an immigrant just because she moved towns, given that she’d followed the real deal, but once she settled into stories of being a private school girl, she came into her own.

She boasts a strong attitude – dismissive and negative – and an ear for a good phrase or tagline. The straight-talking payoff to the section about her mum tracing her roots on ancestry.com could lay claim to being the standout line of the gig,

Comics from the Northern Territories, where there’s not much of a comedy scene, are often at a disadvantage in this competition, and so it was with Scott Northover. Although being a little uncertain, he has a smartly put-together set with a few nice lines, but noticeably undercooked compared to the bigger-city comedians. It would also be to his benefit if there was less focus on the usual trope men being useless and wives being demanding.

Elysia Hall has an appealingly blunt, withering attitude, most effectively showcased in her astute description of straight women on their hens’ night. She likes both a dirty joke and laying into the heterosexuals, and although her bit about their appropriation of the word ‘girlfriend’ is overegged, it wraps up strongly. We’ll be seeing more of her.

Seemingly a lot less experienced, Trish Hurley could do with an ounce of Hall’s conviction and confidence, as her routine about being a hypochondriac ex-nurse was dry and formally delivered, as if she was reading an essay.

Finally, William Wang had sone solid jokes about being Chinese – including pretending not to be – covering the controlling regime, the poor air quality, and his compatriots’ love of baby milk. But it’s impossible not to compare him to Shi, who had a more idiosyncratic take on the same topics, if not quite so slick.

Review date: 17 Apr 2023
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett