My Least Fave MICF Show :(((

A big edition of Gag City today! But that's what happens when you let two days worth of writing pile up—so please enjoy this recap of my Thursday and Friday at the Comedy Festival.

I'm writing this listening to Bon Iver's live concert album which dropped yesterday. If you're looking for a soundtrack for this long read (sorry), consider Volumes: One (which ends the perilously long decade we had to survive with no official recording of Heavenly Father on streaming platforms).

On Thursday I started my night off with Josh Thomas’ Jiggle Jiggle, a one hour standup set about how Josh has been dealing with a particularly nasty moment in his life but reader, I have nothing positive to share about this show.

Before we delve, I think it’s worth acknowledging that Josh’s TV show Please Like Me is one of my favourite TV shows ever. His nuanced depictions of mental health, friendship, and neurodiversity seared themselves into my brain and in many ways became the blueprint for the life I wanted to lead. It wasn’t long after Please Like Me finished airing that I moved to Narrm to live with friends in a poorly insulated sharehouse of my own. Rewatching Please Like Me as uni started helped me romanticise the ramshackle and messy life I was living and every time I return to it I find more to love about these characters and the vivid city they inhabit.

One of my favourite things about the series is how it almost never mentions ‘Melbourne’ but the city still feels so crucial to the storytelling. When I visit Docklands I’m just thinking about Allan, or at St Kilda Beach I’m thinking about Arnold, or by Birrarung Marr I’m thinking about Hannah & Mae at the coffee cart, and even once I drove past the former home of Lûmé and thought of Rose and how happy she was in S04E04 and what came after that. Basically, this show is everything to me.

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I’m fully aware of the controversy that Josh has attracted before—his comments about casting diversity in 2016 are f*cked up, and the series’ approach to race and queerness beyond gay stuff on screen is both rare and clunky. More recently he defended Bailey Smith against allegations of homophobia, saying that calling out homophobia “widens the divide and alienates people.” Unfathomably disappointing to hear this respectability politic coming from the creator of one of the most important shows for queer folks in Australia in the 2010s.

Which brings us to 2026 in the Fairfax Studio in Arts Centre Melbourne where I’m watching Josh Thomas regale us with a story about how he was protested in a show last year about his silence on Gaza. For better or for worse there’s a lot of people from whom I’ve had to accept silence from—silence may be violence but it’s probably better than bringing up Gaza for ten minutes and saying you ‘don’t have a solution for it’ and that if you ‘had a solution for it I wouldn’t be charging entry to my show to hear it’ and that ‘it’s bad and everyone needs to stop.’ Thanks for the sizzling insight Josh.

But I’m probably letting my wokeness get away from me. Maybe he was actually funny if a little politcally gauche? Reader, no. In 2026 Thomas’ ambling punchlines and stories about tour life and his collection of vermouth and paintings felt so out of touch. His schtick might’ve read as quirky and offbeat in 2010 but in a comedy festival full of neurodiverse queer excellence—there’s really nothing that sets Josh apart.

In one particularly irksome bit detailing his experiences being pulled up by government censors in Singapore for being gay, he remarked to the audience ‘What’s the worst that could happen? It’s not like they’d have killed me.’ Reader, the same day that he made that remark two men were hung by the Singaporean government for drug offences. My brain kind of broke witnessing this show, I mean how can you call yourself a progressive (which he does) if your politics begin and end with the rights of white gay men to f*ck?

I haven't even mentioned one of the most frustrating parts of the show—how it was punctuated with schlocky magic tricks—think flowers appearing out from under his cape and magic wands growing in size. Unfortunately for Josh I recently caught a spectacular show which fuses magic and comedy to explore contemporary transphobia, so his half-assed attempts at distracting us into having a good night bounced right off me. And then he brought his dog on stage for a trick which… I mean can you reasonably describe holding your dog in the air while a song plays a trick?

It all just felt so out of touch, so unprepared, and so desperate. It‘s a shame really, as I didn’t mind his set last year (but it might’ve been sticker shock). While watching this set I could mournfully feel the magic of Please Like Me fading, replaced by this nostalgic Alibaba knock off.

In Jiggle Jiggle Josh’s comedy is unfathomably self-centred, dripping in white privilege and ignorance, and far too rambly to be called a tight five (indeed, his whole set went ten minutes over leaving me running to my next comic). Do yourself a favour and avoid this show. Stick to watching Please Like Me at home.

Elf Lyons’ Swan on the other hand, was a highlight of my night—a clown reimagining of Swan Lake which was just pure delight. This is the third show of Elf's I've seen and I can't get enough of them.

Presented in mock French, Elf explains the conceit of Swan Lake and ballet more broadly, before lurching into an unhinged retelling of the show. Elf tells us about the byzantine system that ballet companies use to cull aging ballerinas, and asks us to save her from the same fate in the course of her retelling.

Writing about the show in The Age, Sonia Nair sums it better than me with:

Lyons punctuates the grandiosity of Tchaikovsky’s score with hilariously contemporary musical interjections, clowning, puppetry, mime, outrageously silly dance moves and gentle audience participation. A show that has only gained more poignancy as Lyons has aged, Swan is ripe for its re-staging.

This is a masterful hour of clown which left me gasping for air. Swan also makes for a beautiful double bill with Elf's other work in progress showing at the festival (read more on that below).

My Thursday ended in the dingy backrooms of The Motley Bauhaus where I went to see Doug & Max Bend Over Backwards to Please You, an hour of absurd sketch and musical comedy from a pair of comics who seemingly share one brain.

Bend Over invites the audience to submit requests for what they'd like to see the pair do on stage (I wrote 'Heated Rivalry but gayer'), before the pair pulled the rug out from under us to reveal that they've planned an entire set themselves—because the audience can't be trusted not to request sex stuff. Alas.

The duo shine in their pre-prepared bits, including a song about how to be straight in the super market (camp) and their extended musical introduction is pure joy. Although, their more improvised moments sometimes veered too far into in-joke territory for me to follow.

Shoutout to the technical design on the show, the composition is lovely and the sound effects are absolutely a highlight. Their tech (the oh so lovely Jacinta Anderson) has a board with a bunch of sound effects which she hilariously wields to reign the duo in and push them further in equal measure.

Performed by these two doofuses who absolutely ooze chemistry and charisma, Bend Over makes for a fun late night musical romp.

One of my favourite standups of the festival from the past couple years has been Laura Davis who's back this year with Swag which I caught last night with dear friends Frankie and Georgie sat either side of me.

Laura's comedy ricochets around the problems of our time and seems to find a way to sit in the unknowingness and multiplicity of perspectives that you need to do daily life. This standup is not neat and never tidy, but its dissonance reveals an artist stuck on how we're meant to live through cataclysmic destruction and terror. If I had to appoint a standup laureate for the apocalypse I think I'd choose Laura—although I think they'd hate that responsibility.

Anywho. This set riffs on strikes, industrial action, and the coming revolution. The hour is structured around mounds of protest signs Laura has been making and hawking off to anyone who needs one. As we read every one of them together, we get an encyclopaedic overview of our fractured politics and how Laura reckons they might be able to play both side to navigate the end of days. It's a lofty conceit which doesn't always land the laugh, but Davis' hour is speedy enough and chockas with Big Ideas that I was left satisfied anyways. Perfect for anyone who feels like they're going insane in a crowd of people who can't see that the world's on fire.

Elf Lyons' Woman on the Edge was a work in progress show I’ll be thinking about for a long time I reckon. Given that it's still being worked on I don't want to say much about the show, but I loved it.

It's a treat to get to watch Elf in the midst of artistic creation, editing and playing on stage—and this show is a marvel, using the journey of Apollo 13 as a metaphor for what healing (in this case, from divorce) can look like. "It's the landing that matters" not the breaking, Elf posits. It's a bewitching dramaturgical conceit and Elf manages to turn one of the worst things that could happen to you into a piercing reminder of how to heal and who we need to love first. Beautiful. I was shocked there wasn't a standing ovation tbh.

I did spend a lot of the night thinking about an artistic collaboration of mine which went sour a couple years back and how I never really processed what happened. It dragged on too long and when it finally ended I just felt so much relief that I never really bothered going back to feel my way through the debris. A mistake, maybe.

This one's only on for a couple dates in the festival and I can't recommend it enough. Go, go, go.

Week two of comedy festival is coming to a close which means we're almost (almost) halfway through! What's been your highlight thus far? Apart from everything I've raved about, mine's been realising I can use the 7-Eleven app to check out and pay for dinner without having to line up (very keen to use this trick tonight lmfao).

Three shows tonight, two tomorrow, and then a beautiful Monday respite for me. Live laugh love comedy fest fr. Chat soon!