It has been a while since I've blogged here, though I've still been busy over at Larvatus Prodeo.

My SO and I are fine. We recently went and saw Opera Australia's production of Carmen, which was decent but a bit less passionate than you'd hope. I've been busy writing papers, and am going to head off to a conference in the Bay Area in early July.

A friend of mine also dragged me along to see The Panics at the Prince bandroom; they're OK, in a Nova FM kind of way. Personally, I thought the support band Little Red were more interesting, with their 60's pop thing.

Oh, and I now weigh a healthy 67 kilograms. I should post a photo of the new, svelte me. Maybe when I get dressed up to see My Fair Lady on the 27th of May....

And so I closed my Comedy Festival with a show that, by chance, neatly encapsulated some of the themes prevalent this year: comedians searching for new political material in the Rudd era, the seeming desire to inject a theme, usually one revolving around a social conscience , into their comedy, and a bit of environmentalism to boot. Happily, Kenneally's was amongst the more successful in this, with an hour of material that a) actually related to the purported topics in the blurb, and was b) genuinely funny.

Kenneally's show was inspired by the 2020 Summit, as he nominated ten broad subject areas to be tackled. There was some nice use of the audience as they were called to participate in his plan to save the world; in another major surprise, my contribution involved my sex life, and alterations to...

While the show had minor pacing problems, this was an amusing, well-researched, well-delivered hour of political standup that had us laughing for an hour. While it's obviously too late to see him now, I'd thoroughly recommend catching any of his future material.

By the way, the Barrys were announced last night; the winners were Kristin Schaal and Nina Conti. Schaal's show wouldn't have topped my list, but it was funny, clever, and quite innovative. At the risk of sounding nasty, I'm just glad Justin Hamilton didn't win. Not that his show was bad, mind you - it was a good, solid show - but its central schtick was blatantly obvious about 30 seconds in, and while it was both funny and thoughtful, it was neither the funniest or most thoughtful piece in the festival. It didn't deserve the raves it was getting.

This is a show that depends very much on its audience for its success or failure on the night. And, while I certainly wouldn't describe the night I saw it as a failure, by any means, with a show filled to the brim with its target demographic this could be the funniest show at the festival.

That target demographic is of course those searching for, well, someone to sleep with, and to this Deborah Frances-White offers a mixture of jokes and self-help. There's gender stereotyping by the bucketload, but, hey, what do you expect in a show about dating?

Potentially the best bits of the show involve dragging various single audience members on stage and getting them to role play dating situations. This, of course, depends enormously on the preparedness of the audience members to ham it up, and where the show foundered a little on this particular night. The single guy hauled up to role-play a bar situation was clearly intimidated by being on stage. This may be entirely realistic, but doesn't exactly make for great entertainment.

But it's a great concept. If you filled the crowd with singles, perhaps lubricated them with a drink or two, and let the show run for another 30 minutes to leave room for some more role-playing, this could be spectacularly funny. As it was our evening, it's a moderately diverting entertainment.

Daniel Kitson is a Comedy Festival fixture, and it's easy to understand why he continues to sell out big venues like the Athenaeum. The man's ruminations wander all over the place and yet manage to make a convincing-sounding case for his view of life, with no shortage of laughs along the way, at the expense of both himself and his audience.

It's arguably about 10-15 minutes too long, and after you walk out of the show and had a chance to think about it, you might start to resent the lecture. It's not quite as simplistic as, say, a Michael Franti concert, but there's a certain element of, perhaps, middle-class smugness to the whole enterprise that can irritate.

But do go and see him at least once, if not for this show than at a future Festival.

The Age's Comedy Festival blog lists the nominations for the festival's annual Barry Awards.

Of the six shows nominated, I've only seen Kristin Schaal and Justin Hamilton's. Both were quite good, but not outstanding. Hamilton's show was undoubtedly clever, but not nearly as clever as he seemed to think it is. Schaal's piece, while it had its great moments, also contained the odd bit that was going to go straight over the head of a local audience.

If I were in charge, at least Bill Hicks: Slight Return and Greatness Thrust Upon Them deserved nominations above Hamilton and Schaal, and if we're picking out stand-up artists Reginald P. Hunter would have been high on my list.

There's been a bit of comedians seeking deeper meaning this year. If that's what you're in to - or you are easily offended - Reginald P. Hunter is not your guy. If it's rank and vile, Hunter has a joke about it. Thankfully, the jokes are more than good enough to justify the use of some pretty risky themes. Most of them are expertly set up, too - he's pretty canny in exploiting the sensitivities of the audience for an apparently serious moment to nail with an outrageous punchline.

Oh, and his concluding joke - while very different - rates with Kristin Schaal's closing routine as the best ending to a show in the festival.

Thoroughly recommended - though I'm not kidding about the potential offence level.

According to The Age's reports, this show had been unjustly ignored. Word seems to have gotten out, because the Victoria Hotel's banquet room was considerably fuller - if not packed to the rafters - for our Friday night show. And the crowd seemed to go away happy.

Nicol's Hiro Protagonist is another example of the standup-as-storytelling genre, delivered with nigh-on-manic energy and regular musical interludes. It's a compelling tale, too; a slightly odd Japanese fan who ends up spending an increasingly lengthy period staying in Niccol's London share house.

There are a number of killer gags in here, including one that I apparently wasn't supposed to find as funny as I did, given the implications Nicol drew about my sex life from it (this is starting to become a trend...). It's fairly raucous stuff in parts, but mostly clever, too. Though, again, enough with the George Bush jokes. I can tell jokes about GWB being dumb!

If you like a well-constructed story from a standup who not only stands, but sings, plays guitar, and runs around the room like a kid on cocaine-flavoured cordial, this is the show of the festival for you. Even if only a few of these apply, it's still recommended as a good night out.

A fair whack of the best works of the popular music pantheon have come from emotional pain of one form or another. And so it is for comedy. Will Anderson brings out his cheeky-grinning smartarse persona for some of his latest standup set. But, like Justin Hamilton, a more reflective and less carefree soul takes center stage for much of this new show.

Anderson manages to walk a fine line here; it's possible for this kind of comedy of personal self-evaluation to become, well, self-indulgent. But there's plenty of punchlines , too, including some moments of improvisation which brought some of the biggest laughs of the night.

Anderson maintains the rage with some political comedy, and though it still got laughs, this part of the show is perhaps less successful. Political comedy can date very quickly; if you're not obsessively reading every piece of political news around, the zeitgeist can move on. And so it was here.

But the high points of this show - exploring some of the lower points of this comedian's life - are superb, and worth seeing for that alone. Recommended.

More comedic theatre, from Frank Woodley, best known as one half of Lano and Woodley. This time, it's at the Comedy Theatre, with an elaborate set, high-quality backing music composed by Paul Mac (Australian electronic music guru and latter-day muse of Daniel Johns). Woodley himself is clearly an enormously skilled performer. And yet...

If you aren't familiar with Woodley's previous work, suffice to say that he tends towards physical comedy, and often adopts a rather meek, scared persona. It's back again here with avengence, as he plays Frank Winkelman, a lonely, scared-of-his-own-shadow introvert who finds himself possessed by the ghost of a free-spirited Irish girl. Woodley throws himself into various bits of slapstick as this role (and the others which I won't spoil) require. I'm still not sure exactly how the combination of performance and clever set design enabled one rather painful-looking (and repeated) stunt, but it's pretty impressive. Woodley claims some of the great physical comedians of the past - Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Jacques Tati - as inspirations for the performance, and you can certainly see where he's coming from.

But I remember seeing a documentary about comedy, where somebody made the point that while we can admire the immense skills of those earlier performers, for a modern audience their stuff isn't actually side-splittingly funny any more. And that's a problem here. Woodley's goofing around, however much of a technical tour de force it might be, sometimes gets a tiny bit twee. It's funny, but I had to concede to my standup-mad girlfriend that it, like Keaton or Chaplin, lacks the visceral, unexpected punch that an outrageous line from a good standup can have.

But if physical comedians are your thing, I doubt there's any better at the festival this year.

This "review" of the Festival Club is largely moot, given that there's different acts every night, and the headliner on Sunday night, Patton Oswalt, has gone back to the US after doing only three solo shows and this gig. That said, there are some things worth taking out of the night:

• American sitcom stars have a rather chequered history when it comes to Melbourne comedy shows, with overpriced tickets justifying stale, poorly researched material. While there was the odd moment where his relative lack of Australian experience showed through, Oswalt is a shit-hot comedian with an abundance of killer material and dead-on timing. He did promise to come back for a longer season in the future; if he does, book your tickets.
• MC Jeff Green is reliably funny.
• Arj Barker is also good. That said, he did have one bit that completely died in the arse. Clearly, the Festival Club audience know that solar forcing, while an appealing hypothesis for a comedian looking for some mockery of environmentalists, is not responsible for climate change..
• You can buy tickets for the Festival Club in advance at the Festival Box Office, despite advertising to the contrary. Given the nervous wait we had to find out whether we'd get in, I'd thoroughly recommend doing so.