MICF 2015: The Comedy Zone & Simon Keck

After wasting away the day watching cartoons and scrolling past tweet after tweet about the Cricket World Cup, I managed be running late for The Comedy Zone. But as I hot-footed it past Carlton Gardens which, was playing host to the Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show, I was proud that my home city was hosting 3 international events, something great for everyone, all on the same day.

I did manage to get there on time to collect tickets and be at the door. The same can not be said, however, for my friend Bree. I’d spoken to her when I was making my way to the venue, and she was closer than me to the venue. But she’d walked in entirely the wrong direction. And kept walking. For a good 10 minutes. It wasn’t until I frantically called her and looked up where she was before we sorted out where she was, which was miles away.  It just kind of boggles me how she can be 24 in 2015 and still be perplexed by her smart phone. Don’t get me wrong, I’m bad with maps. Like, really bad with maps. But that’s the beauty of the smart phone; it show you a route, you start walking, and then you correct if the little you-dot seems to be going in the wrong direction. How do you go TEN MINUTES in the wrong direction before realising?

Anyway, I digress.

Props need to be given to the guy at the door (who’s name now escapes me), who let me leave her ticket with him while I went into the show. And to all the staff and volunteers at the festival for that matter – you guys ROCK!

This was my first time going to a Comedy Zone, and I certainly recommend it. The show consists of 5 hand-picked up and coming stand ups from around the country. If you’d like the to see someone new and relatively unknown, but are too chicken to show up at the Town Hall and pick something from the dozens of flyers thrust your way, this is for you!  

 This year Jacob Lingard (QLD) hosts as MC to fellow comics Matt Ford (QLD), Ciaran Lyons (WA), Nina Oyama (NSW) and Matt Stewart (VIC). They may be relatively new to the scene, but they have all found their groove on the mic – each with their own style and poking fun at their unique quirks. They were all fun spirited and energetic, commanding the room with charisma despite a fair splattering of empty seats. You should totally go and fill those seats – these guys are well worth it.

Our comedy appetites throughly whetted, we decided to pick another show and crossed the city to the Imperial Hotel. Bree left me in charge of picking an act, and I chose Simon Keck for no other reason than who could resist “Eating Tiger Dicks”?

I had no idea what to expect, but I’m very glad I chose this show. It’s great.

This is about the moment Bree lost it.

This is Bree losing it.

I love standup, but having seen a lot in the lead up to the festival I was really pleased to see something different. Keck has crafted a show around the deplorable fictional self-help guru Tug DeLabranska. The character was a perfect caricature and, yes, had me and Bree telling one another they’re a piece is shit. He didn’t have to look far for material, sometimes spouting passages from real-world self-help works. This intensity was intermittent with the more transitional comic-rumblings of the narrator, as well out-right absurdity. It was all together dark, outrageous and uproarious. Perhaps my favourite thing about festival time is seeming my friends enjoy a show, and this show and Bree in tears.

Of course, I too lamented along with other festival goers at the rumble of fireworks interrupting the show. While earlier I was beaming proudly at the diversity in my fine city, now I was cursing cricket fans for ruining my comedy festival. It’s a ludicrous sport anyway.

Both shows are running in Melbourne until the 19th of April!

How Twitter Saved My Comedy Festival

I love the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. It is by far my favourite time of the year. Most years I will splurge on a long time favourite like Arj Barker, Cal Wilson or Frank Woodley one night, and then at least once wonder past the town hall with my Dad and pick something random from the flyers thrust towards us. In 2012 I even ventured out for a night on my own, and to my delight stumbled into a Sara Kendall show.

Whether the show is spectacular or a total flop, it’s always a good time. 

Last year I was living in Perth at comedy festival time, and was very disappointed to have missed it. So this year was going to be different! I was going to throw caution to the wind and get to as many shows as I could muster. I almost entered the Funny Tonne (if I won I would be allowed access to all the shows, but be required to write a review of each one), but since I’d recently embarked on a new career and started a new job I decided it was best left for another year. I’d been unwell for the month leading up to the festival, so I felt I deserved a little pick-me-up. Who needs savings, right?!

Then I unexpectedly lost my job.

My hopes for this years comedy festival came crashing to their knees (along with my self esteem and financial security). 

All hope was not lost. I recalled in 2011 when a funny tweet I made scored me a free double pass to see Man Vs Wil, and turned to Twitter once again. (The tweet was “Ban food, make them all do a tequila shot every 10 minutes, last one standing gets the Gold Logie.” in reference to what should be banned at the logies).

When a fellow MICF buff and Anderson fan invited me to go with her friends to see ‘Wiluminati’ I was SO happy, if nervous about meeting strangers from the Internet. After some Internet sleuthing (read stalking) I concluded that she was, indeed, a real, normal person. Success! My comedy festival was saved.

But the twitter scrawling didn’t stop there. Retweeting the venue manager at the Imperial Hotel got me tickets to ‘Nellie White is the Shitty Carer’, followed by ‘3 Little Gigs’ on the opening night (Wednesday), Lauren Bok awarded me tickets to the ‘Radio Variety Hour’ on Thursday and a competition via theMusic.com.au got me tickets to John Kearns’ ‘Sight Gags for Perverts’ for Friday and Justin Hamiltons ‘Johnny Loves Mary Forever 1994’ on Sunday. Another twitter competition got me a double pass to Jennifer Wong in ‘Laughable: The One-Liner Show’ to round out my Sunday night. So that makes 7 free shows and it’s only day 4 of the festival! May have been a couple more, but I took Saturday off to spend some time with my honey. This could shape up to be my most successful comedy festival yet.

With my career and my health in jeopardy at the moment, it’s lovely to be able to share some laughs with friends.>

Daily Prompt: All About Me | Hellcat Origins

Today’s Daily Prompt asked bloggers to explain why they chose their blog’s title, and what it means to means. 

Although I’ve only been posting for a short time, the search for the name of my blog started quite some time ago. I didn’t have a theme for what I would write about, I just intended post anything; from anecdotes, to reviews and opinion pieces, to works of fiction. It’s just a place to practice writing in all it’s forms. I really had no idea where to start looking for a name. To begin with I just looked at the things around me, and these were added to my shortlist:

• Checkered Trunk: inspired by the blue elephant on my mug of tea and the checkered pattern on a calendar in my office.
• Butterfly Mountain/Mountain Butterfly: inspired by the dress I was wearing, which has a butterfly pattern on it, but in my sleepiness I imagined the butterflies to be snow-capped mountains.

I tried to think of something that described me, but that proved difficult. There was nothing iconic that I really identified with. In my early high school days I considered myself a bit of an odd ball, and I used to wear one of those multi-coloured hats with a propeller on top that slack-jawed kids holding ice creams wear in movies. So I considered for a time calling my blog “Propeller-Hat Girl Grown Up” based on my nickname from the time. But I’d moved on from that identity, and for the most part the people I knew then, so it didn’t really feel like me any more.

I really like wordplay and especially anagrams, so I considered using one of my favourite anagrams “Dynamo Monday”, but I felt that I would feel obligated to post on Mondays and only Mondays. ‘Dynamo’ also conjured up various connotations in my mind, and I’m just not sure I’m ‘electrifying’ enough for a title like that.

This thought got me onto the path of anagrams. I started to explore anagrams of my name (both with and without my middle name), which is how I found “Miry Mosey’s Hellcat”. Some of the rejected short-listed names included:

• Systemic Holler
• Most Silly Cheer
• Comely Slithers (what a combination, huh? So sexual and sleazy),
• Lily Rot Schemes (for some unknown reason I really like the sound of this one, although it does come across more sinister than I consider myself to be)
• Chilly Somerset (kind of sounds like a hideous suburban estate, don’t you think?).

But eventually I came to setting on “Miry Mosey’s Hellcat” mostly because I like the sound of it. I was also looking to move on from my previous online alias, which had been “somethingbetterthanmylastidea” (or “somethingbetter” for short) since I was about 9 years old. “Miry Mosey” and/or “Miriam Mosey” had a nice sound to it, I think it suits me and I checked that the username MiryMosey was available on the vast majority of websites I was likely to use (Twitter, Gmail, Tumblr, etc). I’m not a huge fan of my “christian” name anyway, so I liked that is sounds ‘real’ enough that I could use that alias if I am ever published as well.

Eventually I intend to adopt a cat, so perhaps at some stage the “hellcat” part of the title will have more significance, but for now it just has a fun ring to it.