Gag City faces torrential rain (with Clowns & Animatronic Cats)

It’s wet. I heard the thunder crack outside my apartment. I’m inside. Angie McMahon is melting into the sound of cars splashing over the road and my belly is warm with Earl Grey. Melbourne International Comedy Festival officially opens tonight, but that hasn’t stopped me from catching a couple shows already (bless The Motley Bauhaus’ unhinged decision to program shows every single night of the week). Here’s a recap of my first night at the festival, delivered as the first edition of my daily-ish MICF newsletter—Gag City.

The first show of my festival was a preview of Taylah Whelan’s Happy Birthday Taylah Whelan. A strong start to the festival, an hour of alt comedy (genre terms are such a struggle for any interesting comedy) in which Whelan flicks back to birthdays of yore and charts childhood for a very specific cohort of young people born from like… 1996 to 2002 (me, basically). The show asked incredibly resonant questions, for me at least: What made us want to leave where we came from to move to Narrm? And what might we have lost in that transition? How do we hold the grief of that loss? And how’s it all shaped us into who we are?

Looking at the notes I took (I’m a real critic!) is just a highlight reel of the cultural soup that I came out of; fanfic, Enrique Iglesias, One Direction, Arctic Monkeys, the death of One Direction. I also wrote down right in the middle ‘blues clues,’ which is what the flat and hand drawn production design brought to mind (I’m always excited when I actually get to talk about production design in the The Motley Bauhaus).

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The last show of Taylah’s that I caught was 2025’s The Worm, a hip and contemporary monologue about dating in Narrm (featuring an animatronic worm) which I really enjoyed. HBTW takes Whelan’s weirdly earnest and acerbic punchlines to another level though. If The Worm felt like the best of an overdone thematic trope, HBTW feels like Whelan carving out a little queer corner for themself to build their own unique brand of comedy/theatre/storytelling. And I’m here for it.

Plus there was another animatronic! This time an uncanny cat named Elvis who had these vividly expressive eyes and a tiny little mouth. Cute and unnerving! And a brilliant source of pathos when it came time for it. I love the world that Whelan (and designer Max Arnold and first time director Kaite Head) have created here—a warm and cozy and not-perfectly-remembered space to revisit our childhoods.

HBTW is a queer coming-of-age story about moving away from home and I am just glad it exists. A weird little show doing its own thing like this is exactly what festivals like this are for. Well worth a trip to The Motley Bauhaus.

Now, I had planned to have an hour of downtime at this point in my night to catch up on some emails and admin but that’s never how these things go. Instead, I bumped into a friend who was planning to catch Max Norman’s Coco The Time-Travelling Tart who managed to sell me on the show after telling me Norman was Gaulier trained, IYKYK.

Initially I had declined PR tickets for this show because of a general wariness of comedians big on social media but turns out—that was a misplaced concern. Coco was phenomenal.

TL;DW Coco (the titular time travelling tart) has lost a pearl earring somewhere in history and so takes us on an adventure through time to find it. Kind of like Doctor Who if the Doctor was a contestant on season one of Drag Race UK. Norman has this wonderful ability to get us all invested in the audience participation and it’s a delight to see—by the end I was pavloved to throw my hands up in the air the second they said ‘Taxi!!” Plus there’s heaps of theatrical gags to keep the clown-wary entertained. Norman is so wonderfully witty and had us all rolling in the palm of their hand. Highly recommended.

As an aside: I swear I’m not endlessly positive with my criticism I just had a very good first night at the festival. Stinkers to come, I’m sure.

Immediately afterwards me and Jade and Georgie (this evening’s comedy partners) dashed upstairs to catch Cat Duff’s Freidah Will See You Now. In the interest of public accountability: Cat and I went to uni together and I have loved her for years so I am entirely biased in that sense. However, I think I can say confidently that Freidah is a hit. Jade mused on her insta story that Freidah feels like a cult classic MICF show and I am very willing to throw my weight behind that suggestion.

Freidah is this mythological figure tasked with us helping us cross the river Styx as a bunch of unlucky and unloved souls who didn’t get a proper burial. But plot twist, Freidah’s passage across the river is illegal and delayed—so we’re gonna sit with her for an hour while she entertains us I guess. There’s a bit with a microwave which feels illegal in the best way (and also very delicious) and the way that Cat takes her buffoonery to the max is wonderful to see.

I was very lucky to see a work in progress showing of this show a couple weeks ago and I am just so impressed with how Cat’s elevated the show since. Very impressive stuff for a solo debut at MICF (and I reckon it’ll go down as one of the most memorable clown sets of the fest).

Cat’s Freidah has that sadness in their eyes that you only see in Eastern European gay p*rn, which reminded me deeply why clown is my favourite genre of comedy. Clown can gesture at the grief and wrong in the world in a way that doesn’t feel manipulative, and manages to transmute sorrow into movement. While everyone’s sick of standups trying to shoehorn their Nanette moment into sets, clowns are just blasting past the, delivering work that cuts deep into How We Live Now™ without any of the eye-rolls that standup sentimentality induces. Go see clown!!! (Especially Freidah!!!)

That’s all for my first edition of Gag City. Hope you liked it! I’d love to hear from you about your festival experience in the comments or via reply. Otherwise, you can expect to hear from me very soon x