The Laugh Resort Comedy Club - Fringe World Preview

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Posted 2024-01-20 by Vanessa Powell ⇒ follow

Fri 19 Jan 2024 - Sun 18 Feb 2024

Weekend Notes was invited along to preview some of the best comedic acts to feature in this year's Fringe World festival. We have the lowdown of what's good and what's worth checking out on this year's program.

Hosted by The Laugh Resort, Australia's longest-running comedy club, an association run by a group of West Australian comedians that promotes live comedy entertainment. It's where some of Australia's best comedians got their start, like Rove and Dave Hughes, also Xavier Michelides who hosted Wednesday night's event.

The club has a home, and a comedy room, upstairs at The Shoe Bar and Cafe in Yagan Square. The venue is cool, The Shoe Bar and Cafe is in the heart of the city right as you get off the bus or train. The city centre, as a public transportation hub, attracts a range of people, there were a couple of jokes about Perth and methheads, so a somewhat upmarket bar in such a central location is a welcome and nice escape from the busyness of the foot traffic on the promenade below around Yagan Square.

If you've ever lived in the Eastern states before, they don't have live entertainment in pubs and clubs anymore, as venues rely mainly on revenues from pokie machines as part of their business models. The Perth nightlife, although a smaller city has a vibrancy with plenty of entertainment options and The Laugh Resort Comedy Club is a good choice to spend an evening out, and at around $20-30 per ticket, it's not that expensive either.

Some of the shows as part of this year's Fringe will take place at the comedy lounge, but also at other venues in and around the city.

All up, there is a total of 24 shows featuring 80 comedians to choose from performing as part of this year's Fringe World. Most of the acts, you probably wouldn't have heard of before, so you really don't know what to expect when attending a show. There were a total of 9 comedians who performed samplers of their various shows at the preview last Wednesday night.

Stand-up comedy is not something I usually attend, but all of the acts were top-notch. Live comedy is an interactive medium, unlike theatre where audiences just sit there rather passively and watch, all of the comedians were able to engage and interact with the audience through storytelling, personal anecdotes and questions to the audience.

Emo Majok presents his show African Aussie. As a person of African ethnicity, he can make jokes about race and whiteness without being labelled a racist. His show touches upon his uplifting story of going from refugee to unlikely comedian.

Aliya Kanani has travelled from Canada to be part of Fringe World. She presents two shows, A Work in Progress about a wellness journey she took through India and All That She Wants described as an unladylike comedy variety show with sexy secrets, life hacks and lots of jokes. Should be interesting.

Emma Krause's show is called 40+ Fabulous. Krause is a teacher, so she has some good teacher jokes. Anyone who has worked as a teacher before will relate. I think she said she promises an education for the guys in her audience and something more relatable for other women.

Mariah O'Dea's show #thenewme pokes fun at the current influencer culture. It seems everyone is on YouTube these days trying to sell something, O'Dea presents a social commentary of the characters that are presented online.

Bad Dads features a line-up of different comedians including comedian David Hughes (there are two in Australia) with their take on fatherhood and what it means to be a dad, fatherhood can be a comedy show in itself. It's an often overlooked subject considering there is a crisis of fatherhood, in the USA alone 1 in 4 children, and an estimated 18.3 million children live without a father in the home .