Yawp Mag ISSUE 19 Getting Ready for the Comedy Festival | Page 22

History of the Melbo

International Comed
"Comedy festivals are more fun than the telly. The
live sweat is good to see whether it's from the
sheer fear of a Montreal make-or-break, the
alcoholic haze of pleasure in Kilkenny, the slopes
club stage at Melbourne".
-Simon Fanshawe, the Guardian, 2004For comedy lovers, during Autumn the Melbourne
International Comedy Festival (MICF) is an annual
mega dose of the biggest local and international
names congregating for a month of stand-up
shows, cabaret, live radio broadcasts, podcasts,
visual art exhibitions, plays, improvisational
theatre, musical shows and debates. Walk through
Melbourne city during the festival's duration, and
you will be surrounded by comedians handing out
blocks with eager people waiting outside some of
Melbourne's biggest venues, including the Town
Hall and Athenaeum Theatre. The MICF is the
third largest comedy festival in the world behind
the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and Montreal's Just
For Laughs Festival. Sydney and Brisbane also
hold large annual comedy festivals. Throughout
the MICF's 27 year history, it has grown to become
Australia's largest yearly ticketed cultural event,
selling more tickets than any other festival.

onto the Australian comedy scene, which helped
launch careers for comedians including Barry
Humphries, Reg Livermore, Ruth Cracknell and
Mary Hardy. These comedians performed in front
of small appreciative audiences, who, according to
Carolyn Laffan, Curator, Performing Arts Museum,
Victorian Arts Centre (2007), were "not afraid to
laugh at themselves as Australians; in Melbourne
a live comedy revolution was brewing in the most
unlikely of locations-the hallowed halls of the
University of Melbourne".

Revues such as The 'Razzle Dazzle Revue'
Before the emergence of the MICF, comedy in the featured satirical comedians comprising of Rod
1960's saw more intimate comedy revues emerge Quantock, Mary Kenneally, Steve Blackburn and