Comedy

Current Issue Teetering

‘The Hunt’ and ‘Spring Breakers’ film review

By Luke Davies

Danish director Thomas Vinterberg made Festen (1998), a family reunion drama so dazzling and disturbing it was hard to look away and yet excruciating to continue looking. In The Hunt (in national release 2 May), Vinterberg continues honing his skills in the cinema of anxiety. Mads Mikkelsen is Lucas, a recently divorced, affable kindergarten teacher at a small school in a tight-knit Danish

April 2013

Comic Relief. Benjamin Law, Zoe Foster, Graeme Simsion

By

It's a very special writer who can make us laugh out loud and Zoe Foster, Benjamin Law and Graeme Simsion make it look dead easy. At the Perth Writers Festival they talk about writing on the lighter side of life. Chair: Rob Payne. February, 2013

April 2013

A Letter to the Editor, from Joe Dolce

By Monthly Wire

Joe Dolce is a singer-songwriter, poet and essayist. This is Joe's letter to Monthly editor John van Tiggelen, written just prior to the publication of 'Shaddap You Facebook' in the April 2013 issue of the magazine: Hi John, OK – I can live with the ‘Shaddap You Facebook’ title. This once. Under normal circumstances, I don’t permit jerry-rigging my poe

Call a somnambulance

‘Sleepwalk with Me’ film review

By Luke Davies

“I think to be a comedian you have to be a little bit delusional. Particularly starting out, there’s just so much failure. And amidst that failure you have to tell yourself, ‘It’s going quite nicely.’ Because if you didn’t, you’d just never get on stage again. You’d be like, ‘I guess human beings don&rsqu

Good medicine

‘One Man, Two Guvnors’ theatre review

By Peter Conrad

One kind of laughter starts in the brain and seldom gets much further than a chuckling at the back of the throat or a scornful wrinkling of the lips as we respond to – or, better yet, say – something witty. Another kind, louder and usually lewder,

Flight of the Conchords

I Told You I Was Freaky

By Robert Forster

They would have to be one of the most successful two-man bands to come out of New Zealand playing a mixture of folk, rock, soul and rap and with a song called ‘Epileptic Dogs’ in the last few years. Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement are Flight of the Conch

'Life in Movement' by Bryan Mason and Sophie Hyde

By Anna Goldsworthy

Tanja Liedtke’s name was suddenly everywhere in May 2007, when she was appointed artistic director of Sydney Dance Company. The 29-year-old dancer and choreographer claimed to be “absolutely ecstatic” about her new role, and there was a great deal of ecstasy in th

December 2011

Best Satire of 2011

By Monthly Wire

Ten of the most amusing reads of 2011 from the Shortlist Daily. I'm sorry I bit you during my job interview "It was great to meet with you and learn more about the company. Please don’t hesitate to call or email if you have any more questions for

Frank Moorhouse’s 'Cold Light'

Age of Innocence

By David Marr

Edith Campbell Berry has crashed to earth in Canberra circa 1950. She is no longer wanted abroad. All her years at the League of Nations and her efforts rescuing refugees from the rubble of Europe (“my best work”) have failed to win her a place with the United Natio

It Tolls for Thee: Generation Text

By Guy Pearse

Ping! New message received. “Hi, this is Dr Carl O’Kane from the Townsville Hospital emergency department. I was taking your medical history so we can treat what looks like a broken tibia but, as you seemed more interested in your texting, I’ve gone to t

Justin Hamilton - 'Circular', 2011

Stand-Up Comedy Masterpiece

By Tim Ferguson

Justin Hamilton is the stand-up comedian of the decade. His latest one-man show Circular is the masterpiece towards which this most dynamic and daring comedian has been building since beginning his stand-up career in 1994. Of all his work, Circular takes the b

Meeting Alex Dimitriades

The Kid Grows Up

By Peter Robb

Nearing 40, a man’s body begins to die. The body knows this. So does the mind, though it can take a long time before the mind knows what it knows about the body, and longer still to become reconciled to mortality. Between first intimation and final acceptance come ang

'Sex: An Unnatural History'

What’s Sex Got To Do With It

By Anne Summers

If I were to nominate the key milestones in the history of human sexual activity – where ‘progress’ is considered to be sex becoming more enjoyable due to the removal of unpleasant, dangerous or even fatal consequences – these would be, without argument: the invention of penicillin, the legalisation of abortion, the decline in maternal mortality and,

Meeting Benedict Andrews

Under Surveillance

By Peter Robb

For the set of Chekhov’s The Seagull, playing at Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney (4 June – 17 July), designer Ralph Myers has made an architect’s model of an Australian fibro beach house and its domestic interiors. Benedict Andrews is directing an Australian vernacular Seagull, transposed by himself from the lakeside dacha to somewhere on the coast – a summer holiday place where people ro

Peter Conrad on Chris Lilley and the Politics of Comedy

Can We Be Heroes?

By Peter Conrad

Why indeed? Laughter is instinctive, and what it conveys is a flushed awareness of superiority. But there is more to it than one boy’s enjoyment of the other’s distress. Dan, for the most part droolingly inarticulate, in this case consents to explain his a

Hans Keilson’s 'The Death of the Adversary' and 'Comedy in a Minor Key'

Case Histories

By Inga Clendinnen

Hans Keilson, a retired psychiatrist of German birth who lives in Amsterdam, was four months away from his one-hundred-and-first birthday when, in August 2010, the New York Times critic Francine Prose pointed her magic pen and declared his two long-ago novels,

Mark Twain and his Autobiography: Volume 1

Parallel Lives

By Peter Robb

A big book by Mark Twain became a bestseller in the US following its publication last November, a hundred years after its author’s death. It was Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume 1 (University of California Press, 760pp; $70.0

Failure to Communicate

By Luke Davies

“Do you know any jokes?” asks a speech pathologist of his newest patient, a stammerer. “Timing is not my strong suit,” the uptight patient replies. It’s the early 1930s and the Australian pathologist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), known for his unorthodox techniques, is working out of pleasantly shabby chambers in London’s Harley Street. The patient is King George VI (Colin Firth) who,