So I think it's about time I talk about shows in the comedy festival that have nothing to do with me.

Okay, so there's this guy, right. He's called Birdman. He's FASCINATING. I've seen him a few times now and he is just so disarmingly hilarious. The other night, he was asked to go up onstage and do comedy with a band behind him. He used the band to hilarious effect. Made the music look funny and the comedy look like music. Brilliant. I highly recommend him. His show is called Birdmanifesto and you should definitely go and see it. Trades hall, book here. And I've never even spoken to him, so this is unsolicited, I promise.

Okay, next. The guy who has the show after Penny, at the Town Hall, is a guy called Justin Kennedy. If you've ever wondered how to perform a one-person show playing lots of characters, this is how. He is an astonishing performer. His show is based on The Lord of The Flies, which makes it kind of hard to market and (especially if you haven't read The Lord of the Flies for a while) hard to understand in parts, but just watch the performance. It's like getting Cliff Notes on acting.

Also, he doesn't need the publicity, but go and see Daniel Kitson. This year, he's lost something: Fear of the Unfunny. Which of course makes him much more interesting and conversely much more funny. Check him out.

I'd recommend some hilarious women but they're all selling out. Yay.

In training for the Sydney Writer's Festival, I've decided I need to finish the books I've started (those on the top of the pile next to my bed). Until then, I'm not allowed to buy or borrow new ones because I don't deserve them.

Over the years, I've become a hopeless reader. When I was a kid, I used to read every book from cover to cover, and then read every other book by that author, in order of books written. Now, I'm hopeless.

You know on your computer, if you press ALT and TAB at the same time, it flicks between one program and another? That's how my life works. There I am, working on a film and then ALT + TAB I'm also working at the Comedy Festival but ALT + TAB I'm working at the Law Foundation and ALT + TAB I'm working at Radio National. All the other windows are open and the programs are running and stuff, but I'm flicking between them all the time, so I never quite optimise my experience.

That's how I read, too. I've had Alan Bennett's new book (which is so funny and brilliant) next to my bed since I ordered it online so I'd get it before anyone in Australia could claim to have read it before me. Several ALT + TABs later and I still haven't finished it but I've read several Joanna Murray-Smith plays, two brilliant scripts by Tom Stoppard and the beginning of a book called Boyhood by Coetzee. I also started a book by Will Self but I lost it down the back of the bed somewhere and I wasn't sure I didn't resent and despise it anyway, so at least this way I don't have to find out.

I do feel so guilty about these books I don't finish. It's a form of infidelity, not unlike when you have to turn off a CD in the middle of a really intense bit where the singer is belting out a particularly complicated couple of bars of climax and you have to rush out of the house but you know you're not paying enough respect to Aretha, or Buckley, or more likely if I'm being honest, Ben Folds.

Anyway, point being, book-wise, I am turning over a new leaf. Last night, after visiting Penny's and Yianni's shows (yay for them by the way, they're selling out)... I went home.

Yes! Home. Not to the Festival Club. Not to a Kitson gig or to support one of the local heroes or to a bar to hang out with people I don't see enough of anymore. I went home, I had a bath and I finished Indian Ink by Tom Stoppard. Yay for Tom Stoppard being clever about British snobbery and writing good characters for women and being a little bit obscure and making you wish you'd studied history right the way through university.

So, I'm on my way. For a lovely take on the reading of books, check out this. Nick Hornby, writer of things like About a Boy, writes a column about what he reads versus what he plans to read every month. Depressingly, he reads more than I do and complains about not reading much and being a philistine. But all that will change now I'm sure and I will become the sort of person Nick Hornby wishes he could be. Or not. We'll see how that one pans out.

Last, ALT + TAB, a dig at The Age, which I realise is a dead horse, but COME ON. Yesterday, they (the Melbourne newspaper that sponsors the comedy festival) ran reviews of Ross Noble (who so desperately needs a good review), two people with national TV shows, and two Americans.

Good. Excellent. So people know what the things they won't be able to get into because they're SOLD OUT are going to be like. What a service to the community.

I went back to my old work today (Tough Love on Triple M) to talk on radio about the two comedy shows I'm directing. For those of you who don't know Tough Love, click here.

It was so fun to be back there, actually. Someone should write a book about radio. It is just such a funny universe. You know how sometimes you listen to the radio and you wonder what sort of people actually take time out of their days to call a radio station?

Well, turns out, all kinds of people do exactly that. Part of my job used to be putting people on air for talkback. I used to get calls from (literally) brain surgeons (that happened twice), truck drivers (that happened more than twice) and one time I got a call from a guy who kept suddenly talking about stocks and shares so his boss wouldn't get suspicious that he was calling a national radio show. When we put him to air, he quite unashamedly put us on hold. A nation waited, listening to a couple of bars of Fur Elise, desperate to hear the end of his story.

So it was good to be back, and wasn't it quite the contrast to Radio National, where (as Mick correctly surmised) there aren't quite so many bomber jackets as one tends to find at Triple M.

Check out the show I was working on at the ABC (The Deep End) here. The eight hour day story mentioned below is available here.

It was interesting working there, although I have to admit that the ABC building at Southbank in Melbourne is very confusing for someone like myself. All the floors are identical. The studios, the bathrooms, the visitors' waiting rooms... Identical.

Which is why I accidentally walked in on a full orchestra rehearsing a quite reverent movement of something by Bach for ABC Classic FM. See? Not the sort of thing you walk in on at Triple M. More likely to walk in on a sales meeting where an executive is up on a table roleplaying his favourite animal (true story).

So, radio is unpredictable (see for example Judith Lucy's show in the Melbourne Comedy Festival) but then so is any job really. One time I worked at the Arts Faculty at Melbourne University and part of my job was processing applications for Special Consideration. One person wrote on his form that he needed an extension because he was "tired on account of being part of a medical experiment".

All in a day's work.

A week is a long time in politics, and we all know the personal is political, so a week is a long time in any context really.

In what might be described as irony, one of the stories I've been producing for Radio national this week is about the estblishment of the eight hour day. A hundred and fifty years ago today, after the industrial revolution in Britain (and the Gold Rush in Bendigo), a bunch of construction workers who were building the law quadrangle at Melbourne University downed their tools and marched through the city, picking up fellow workers from other sites and making their point in the centre of the city. The rest of the western world eventually followed by example. Followed. Melbourne. That was how the eight hour day - and Mars commercials - were established: 8 hours of work, 8 hours of rest and 8 hours of play.

Which of course is why workers' rights are so enormously respected today.

Now, this all feels very close to home for me because:

1. I studied in the Law Quadrangle. In fact, it was the stones in the law quadrangle, laid by the very stonemasons who started all this ratbaggery, that I rested my bike on when I rushed to the Law Faculty to hand in my essays at three minutes to five on the due date.

2. The eight hour day is being celebrated by the deliciously historical people in at the Trades Hall in Melbourne, which is where Yianni's comedy festival gig is (where they call you comrade and give you a free beer when you've just performed a show).

3. Our office in at Radio National is opposite Damien's office. Damien runs the Law Report. I work for the Victoria Law Foundation, which is running Law Week. Also, I'm doing a story on the comedy festival which I've been working at every night, I'm doing a story on the history of protest (in which I feature) and I'm doing a story about writing theatre shows and not being able to get them on in any theatres unless you do the whole thing yourself (which, I dunno, DESCRIBES MY LIFE). So. Maybe if I stayed at Radio National, next week I'd be doing a story on people who come from Eltham and cut their finger almost completely off in grade four and who used to be vegetarian and aren't anymore.

The eight hour day. I wish!

I think maybe my life works in the exact opposite way to everyone else's. The busier I am, the further into my work, the bigger my social life becomes.

I'm working at Radio National this week with some fabulous people (including my very addictive friend Michael Williams, which I'm sure will get one of us fired), and then every night I go to one of my shows to discover a long list of people I haven't seen in years.

It's brilliant. Do come and see the shows because I'm sure I've been dying to see you.

Penny's show has been reviewed here and in the new comedy zine, The Pun, and both her houses and Yianni's are starting to fill up, so make sure you book.

And check out the new Aussie film with my friend Simon in it. Kokoda, which I haven't seen yet and which is reviewed rather bizarrely in The Age today, is definitely my first outing after the festival finishes. I'm going to try not to giggle every time he comes on screen purely by virtue of the fact that I know he doesn't usually wear army gear. Peehee. The fourth wall comes a tumbling down.

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.

Both of the shows I'm directing in the Comedy Festival, Yianni's Head and Penny Tangey in Kathy Smith Goes to Maths Camp, have opened with their pre-Easter preview shows.

The Peter Cook bar was abuzz with highly strung comedians on the first night of the festival. Each of them had a story about something that went wrong. Projectors changed their minds half way through shows, CD players didn't work, audiences wandered into venues far too early to discover the punchline standing on stage, half dressed in a chicken costume and swearing at the front of house staff.

Yianni and Penny were not without drama. Yianni's show suddenly had to have a new ending, due to the fact that the slides he was supposed to respond to did not appear on the slide screen. Thankfully, this proved to be much more amusing than the original ending. We've now changed the show accordingly.

Penny's show went well, apart from the fact that about eighty percent of her audience accidentally lined up in Will Anderson's queue and didn't show up to Penny's until about a third of the way through. Distracting for Penny? Yes. Disconcerting for the audience? Hell yeah. Mind you, it's funny to think that some of Penny's crowd might have actually made it through to be seated in Will Anderson's audience and left an hour later, rather baffled as to where exactly the maths references were.

As I said to everyone I spoke to, hey, it could have been so much worse.

Here are some edited highlights from my experience in live entertainment:

1. Primary school production, Sleeping Beauty
I was in grade five, playing a character with a cockney accent (which I retrospectively realise must have been because one of the teachers realised I had watched a lot of Dickens movies). Anyway, the fairies in the Sleeping Beauty were played by boys (a joke in itself of course, enjoyed no more by anyone else than by the boys themselves). They were each given stockings, a leotard, and a wand made out of cardboard.

Every woman knows that negotiating a leotard - particularly with the stockings underneath - is quite a complex little game when one is young and one really needs to go to the toilet. I don't want to drag this out unnecessarily. Suffice to say that one of the boy fairies performed a miserable little dance on opening night with poo all over his tights and dropping off him onto the stage.

2. Primary School Production, The Wizard of Oz
I played a munchkin, whose job it was to describe in an over-dramatic and long-winded way, the circumstances wherein the house had fallen on the wicked witch. (I now realise of course that partly this was a joke in itself. As the show wore on, the descriptions became more ridiculous and verbose. Everybody knows typecasting is funny).
My other job was to accidentally knock the hat off the Mayor, played by a boy called Lucas. Lucas was the tallest boy in the world. One night, he actually had to bob down so that I could knock his hat off, because my previous eight attempts had really dragged the whole show to a standstill.

3. Secondary school production, Three Sisters.
I was playing Irina in Three Sisters and Rory was playing the doctor. Rory somehow made me senseless with giggles. Three Sisters is a play by a Russian dramatist called Chekhov. It's not cool to become hysterical with snorty giggles in a Chekhov play. Well, the director didn't think so anyway.

4. The Really Useless Theatre Company, The Max Factor.
In the middle of The Max Factor, the lights went out. I was sitting next to Lawrence Leung, in the audience, and he still has little crescent moons on his arm from when I reached over and grabbed him in order to prevent myself from screaming and running from the theatre. After what seemed like several hours, the lights came up but they were tinged with a violent red. The play suddenly had all these evil undertones. As did I.

5. Standing There Productions, People Watching.
People shouldn't go out and party the night before a show. That is all I am prepared to say on this point.

6. Tough Love, Triple M. When you're in charge of reading out the best of the year's emails sent in by listeners to a national audience and you realise - on air - that what you've brought upstairs is not the listener emails but the article you printed out about a chip that's being sold on ebay because it looks like Mary Magdalene, you have to make sure you remember to breathe.

I've just realised this list could go on forever. Why anyone would work in a nine to five job is beyond me. Imagine the glamour of stuttering your way through some made up emails on radio, or slipping on your own poo in a fairy costume on stage. What a fabulous career choice.