Melbourne International Comedy Festival 2014

The Melbourne International Comedy Festival is the third largest comedy festival in the world, celebrated annually in an international stage. The festival, also one of Australia’s largest cultural events in the present, is already running for more than two decades since it was launched in 1987 behind the initiatives of co-founder, John Pinder, who went abroad with the approval and funding of the Victorian Tourism Commission. He studied and wrote a report of the feasibility of staging an international comedy festival in Australia. The state government accepted the proposal, and the Melbourne International Festival started that said year with 56 different shows for the pilot year.

In 1987, the shows featured a variety of performances from the likes of Gerry Connolly, Rod Quantock, Wogs Out of Work, Los Trios Ringbarkus and Doug Anthony All Stars. Twelve years after, the number of acts featured in the festival doubled to 120 and had an annual attendance of some 350,000 local and foreign spectators. As of now, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival serves as a stage for a number of plays, debates, musical shows, improvisational theatre, sketch shows, art exhibitions and of course, stand-up and cabaret acts. Mobile theatres such as Quantock’s “Bus” also gains popularity as an experimental atypical comedy venue.

The annual Melbourne International Comedy festival is now home to almost 500 shows and more than 5,000 performers from Australia, the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States and Canada. More than half a million of people attends the festival yearly to watch the shows which accounts to more than 10 million Australian dollars in box-office revenue.

The Melbourne International Comedy Festival activities were traditionally held at the Universal and Athenaeum. But since the 1990s, the festival expanded to Melbourne Town Hall which is now the center of the festivities, and to Melbourne Trades Hall.

The three developmental programs, Raw Comedy (an open mic competition), Class Clowns (for high schools students), and Deadly Funny (for indigenous people of Australia) are also trademark competitions and events of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.