My Essay, By Lorin Clarke

Why the Melbourne International Comedy Festival is like University

The Melbourne Comedy Festival is just like doing an undergraduate degree for six years at university while working part time in the Arts Faculty (an experience I presume we all share). First of all, the comedy festival feels like something you should look forward to. You get a timetable with all these exciting weird postmodern subjects on it and you rush over to enrol but the queue goes forever so you wait til the end of the week. Sometimes you see a subject in the timetable and you think, that sounds boring, but then it turns out the dude that teaches it is completely brilliant and everyone's trying to get into his class because he strays from the course material and tells fabulously interesting stories about being in the navy. It's all about word of mouth, so by the end of the week, you can't get in anywhere.

Of course, the big core subjects are hugely over-attended and usually pretty mediocre. Quite often it’s the same guy doing the same material he was doing when your older brother was in first year.

No matter, there are many subjects to pick, but it’s probably inevitable that you’ll spend a great deal of your time interpreting homophobic subtexts, deconstructing gendered performativity, and drinking too much beer.

In conclusion, the comedy festival is like university because it's a hard slog that starts out being fantastic fun and then by the end you're exhausted, poor, addicted to coffee, and you think maybe you should have gone to film school instead.