British comedian Kate Smurthwaite discusses the power of comedy as a force for good, with Alex Bainbridge.
comedy
Tim Minchin is BACK in this film of his last international tour. It shows him to be a remarkably talented, sharp-witted performer with astonishing musicality. Barry Healy reviews.
Comic impersonator, poet and activist, Helchild, is back with another riotous show at the 2022 Melbourne International Comedy Festival, writes Darren Saffin.
Not content with f#%*ing our planet, billionaires are now competing in a self-indulgent race to f#%* space, while thousands die of COVID, writes Helchild.
Fully Sikh
By Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa
Starring Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa & Pavan Hari
Black Swan Theatre Company & Barking Gecko co-production
Season ends November 3
Sukjit Kaur Khalsa has done the hard yards in fighting racism in Australia. She has given speeches to parliamentarians and caused a sensation on Australia’s Got Talent.
Fully Sikh is her (nearly) one person show that names and shames racism, but also goes beyond that.
Regular readers of Green Left Weekly will sometimes admit their favourite part of the paper is Carlo’s Corner, the semi-regular satirical column by comic writer and performer Carlo Sands.
In a paper filled with heavy and even gloomy topics, people appreciate the chance to laugh — especially at the seemingly all-powerful forces who presume to be our betters yet cause so much pain.
“No joke can change the world, or really anything at all,” Sands says, ahead of his stand up show Inspired? at the Sydney Fringe Comedy Festival.
“How does it aid the revolution, you trying to be funny?” The left-wing Liverpudlian Alexei Sayle, future star of the BBC’s comically demented The Young Ones, was flummoxed by this question posed to him by an exiled Arab revolutionary in Sayle’s London flat in 1971, in which the General Congress of the deadly serious Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arab Gulf was being held.
Sayle, the son of working-class communists, was a “practising communist” himself. But he also loved clowning around, he writes in Thatcher Sole My Trousers, his follow-up memoir to his childhood reminiscences in Stalin Ate My Homework.
"Should Team Autralia Be Disqualified?' was the theme of a comedy debate held as a fundraiser for Green Left Weekly in Sydney on October 17.
Tony Abbott received a much-deserved roasting on the opening night of the Sydney Fringe Comedy festival on September 1.
Unfortunately no actual fire was involved, but the prime minister — played disturbingly well by Jonas Holt (whose Abbott impersonation has featured on Weekend Sunrise and the At Home With Tones webseries) — was subjected to an amusing grilling.
Go Back To Where You Came From Series Two SBS One From Tuesday, August 28, at 8.30pm Catherine Deveny wasn’t quite sure what she would be in for when she agreed to appear in the second series of SBS’s hit refugee reality TV show, Go Back To Where You Came From. But it seems everyone on the show, which makes Australians re-trace the steps of asylum seekers fleeing war zones, was equally wary of her. It was only when the left-wing author, comic and Green Left fundraiser turned up for filming that she found out who her co-stars were.