With the festival entering its final five days, the nominees represent the most applauded and talked about shows of the month.
The Melbourne International Comedy Festival has announced their award nominees for the Most Outstanding Show, Best Newcomer, Golden Gibbo, Directors’ Choice, People’s Choice, The Pinder Prize, and Piece of Wood comics’ choice award.
Keep up with Melbourne’s latest comedy news, reviews and interviews here.
A bumper list of ten nominees has been announced for the 2023 Melbourne International Comedy Festival Award for Most Outstanding Show. These nominees include Emma Holland with her show Save The Orangutans; Gillian Cosgriff with Actually, Good; New Zealand’s own Guy Williams for Comedy Plus Time Equals Tragedy; Hannah Camilleri’s Lolly Bag; UK’s Jordan Gray with Is it a Bird?; Laura Davis with Well Don’t Just Stand There Dancing; UK export Leo Reich’s show Literally Who Cares?!; Liz Kingsman for One Woman Show; UK’s Rosie Jones for Triple Threat; and Tom Ballard for It Is I.
The Best Newcomer nominations include Aiden Willcox & Isaac Haigh, who presented Songs from the Heart in the Hole of my Bottom; Andrew Hamilton for Jokes About the Time I Went to Prison; Bron Lewis for Probably; Freddie McManus for Freddie McManus Is Stoppable; He Huang for Bad Bitch; New Zealand’s Ray O’Leary for Everything Funny All The Time Always; and Sashi Perera for Endings.
Aimed at finding a local, independent show that pursues the artists’ idea more than it pursues commercial gain, The Golden Gibbo is named after the late, great comedian and actress Lynda Gibson. The 2023 nominees are Andy Balloch for Am I the Drama; Con Coutis for Con vs Con vs Con; Gillian Cosgriff for Actually, Good; Liam Sparrow-Grange for The Magical Tram of Thought! and Woah, Alyssa! 5.
Additional awards will be bestowed, including Directors’ Choice, awarded by the Festival Director in consultation with festival programming colleagues to a show they think deserves to be celebrated; the People’s Choice Award for the most popular show of the Festival as determined by the ticket-buying public; The Pinder Prize, honouring Festival co-founder John Pinder, and supporting a performer to travel to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe; and the Piece of Wood comics’ choice award, selected by past winners and presented to a peer literally for “doin’ good stuff ‘n’ that”. The winners of these awards will be announced on Saturday, and the Festival will come to a close.
If you haven’t yet had a chance to catch any of these shows, there are only five days left to do so, so be sure to grab your tickets before it’s too late.
The Melbourne International Comedy Festival ends on April 23. For more info and to grab tickets, head here.
