Katherine Phelps

I’ve been to a number of recordings for television shows. In the early 90s I sat in the audience for Hey Hey It’s Saturday. A few years back I was in the audience for Spicks and Specks. Last year and this year I attended recordings for the Madman Warehouse Comedy Festival. The Warehouse Comedy Festival [...]

If you are starting out in comedy and thinking about doing a solo show, go see The Cat’s Meow. It is beautifully elegant in its simple construction. Saunders clips to the curtain behind him a list of topics his show will be covering, such as awareness, names, exercise, and technology. He then begins each topic [...]

In some ways Dave Gorman’s show Powerpoint Presentation is nothing new. He talks about the wife, he tells piddle jokes, he mocks advertising. Many comedians like adding multimedia to their performances. Nevertheless, you laugh much harder when Gorman tells the jokes. He’s a consummate standup comedian. Timing. Gorman maintains a brisk even pace throughout his [...]

Father, Father is a middle of the road show: middle age, middle income, middle outlook on life. Bizarrely, this makes it unique amongst festival shows. Most play around with the fringes of society. Father, Father is a welcome addition because it keeps the festival a chocolate box of varied delights. The media focuses people on [...]

Companies such as Internode or iiNet should be putting sponsorship money into comedy. So many comedians are helping to popularise networking tools. Twitter is used live in numerous shows including #ShitMickNevenSays and Mark Watson in The Information. Watson also plays around with Facebook and Q codes. The Information is a fun evening of light entertainment. [...]

One of the challenges I’ve had reviewing this year comes with seeing two similar festival shows in one night. I had one night where I saw two shows using mime, another where I saw two sketch shows, and last night when I saw two British standups. The problem comes when my mind automatically starts to [...]

When I was a kid one grandmother repeatedly told me I was like my distant cousin Margaret. It used to drive me nuts. I had never met this woman and I would much rather be seen as myself than a copy. When I briefly met Rob Lloyd two years ago at Melbourne Fringe, my first [...]

UK troupe Idiots of Ants (say that fast and you get “idiot savants”) brings a high level of polish to their sketch work. Much of their material could happily insert itself into the likes of BBC television shows Big Train or The Armstrong and Miller Show. Idiots of Ants start with their strongest and lengthiest [...]

I am particularly fond of Simon Godfrey of This is Siberian Husky. He and Dan Allemann used to run Willow Tales, a storytelling gig held at Willow Bar in Northcote. This is where I became familiar with people such as Celia Pacquola, Dave Thornton, and Toby Truslove. I’ve also enjoyed his performances in impro comedy [...]

100% Nuts is a well structured two hours of comedy. A group of recent graduates from a stand-up course decided to put on a festival show. They managed to bring in some seasoned comedians to pepper throughout their own performances, and arranged for the show to be MCed by the very talented and personable Xavier [...]