IF YOU’VE JUST WOKEN FROM A COMA, you won’t know that the term ‘bucket list’ means a list of things that one would like to do before dying – that is, before ‘kicking the bucket’, or going back into a coma. According to the Wall Street Journal, it was screenwriter, Justin Zackham, who coined the term when he was composing a checklist that …
I FIRST SAW THE DOUG ANTHONY ALL STARS, or DAAS if you are in a hurry, at the Union Building in RMIT University, Melbourne. It was 1994, and the trio had reached a decade into their abusive, in-your-face, yet somehow intellectual, comedy careers, that sprouted from the streets of Canberra where they first busked. Tim Ferguson, tall and charismatic to the left. …
FIRST THERE WAS ‘SHAUN OF THE DEAD’. Up until then zombies were only grotesque, not hilarious. But Simon Pegg and Nick Frost changed the rules proving that zombies could be slap-stick, while you slapped them over the head with a stick, or a baseball bat. You get my meaning. Now’s there’s Australian ‘Me and My Mates vs. The Zombie Apocalypse‘. Much like …
There’s many ways to write a joke. At the Hard Knock Knocks stand-up comedy school, we teach three. Our favourite joke structure is the Normal-Normal-Twist. The Normal-Normal-Twist takes the audience on a familiar journey and then suddenly zigs sideways, with a surprise. And no, we didn’t invent this. It’s been used by comedy greats for aeons, even Jerry Seinfeld. Seinfeld demonstrates …
BUNGEE JUMPING, PARACHUTING and stand-up comedy. These are possibly the three most legally terrifyingly activities that one can do today, and yet, with the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in full swing, the city is crawling with hundreds of comic masochists. So what makes them do it? What makes someone leave a perfectly safe seat, climb onto a stage, grab a microphone …
