As opening salvos go, the Newcastle Comedy Festival's first shot across the bow on Saturday night had the shells whistling in the ears.
Eleven of the Festival's top comics performed in a barrage of tight, rapid-fire sets teasing a packed house with the line-up of diverse talent set to deliver nearly a month of laughs across the city through July 20.
From the character routine of My Cousin Vlad to the intensely structural Paige Hally, through the polished paces of TV comics Luke McGregor and Nazeem Hussain, the Comedy Festival Gala boasted something for everyone and had Civic Theatre bursting at the seams.
Visiting Sydney funnyman Daniel Muggleton turned his lethal wit and acerbic charm to host the evening, setting the tone as the house lights went down and the stage went up with riff after riff that flowed like pure invention.
From picking out early bits from the crowd: "Any Americans in?" (a scattered cheer) "Three? That's too many."
To blending seamlessly into picking apart the peculiarly Australian relationship to its politicians compared to our cross-Pacific cousins: "I watch the Super Bowl every year and when the President comes on the jumbotron, you all cheer." then: "We lost one Prime Minister; Harold Holt went for a swim, didn't come back, and we just stopped looking."
To circling back and turning his own searing elocution onto the idea of crowd work itself: "Australian audiences are here for you, but not there for you," he joked. Then, speaking for his audience back to the comedian, "I bought my ticket ... I just finished work. Maybe you should start?"
Muggleton's seeming ease and control of the stage was the hand at the helm on the raucous voyage that followed, stopping at familiar ports, like My Cousin Vlad's aeroplane pilot intercom, to Luke Heggie's bone-dry evisceration of modern soft spots (Passive-aggressive? No, he said, "I'm correct, and I'm being a little bit funny at the same time"), to unexpected and surprising detours.
Opening act Brett Blake arguably had the hardest spot to fill; early in the night, a relatively cool room that had just found its seats, everyone anticipating how the next two hours were likely to go. He burst onto the stage like a storm and tore through the anticipation in a blitzkrieg of minutes.
Luke McGregor's mid-show reveal that he has moved to Newcastle for love had the locals on side. And Chris Ryan's acidic decimation of the modern foibles of optimised success was as devastating as it was rib-busting funny: "You climbed K2? Great. I'm lonely. Climb that mountain."
Headliner Cameron James was - fittingly for the local name on the bill - ushered on stage to a Silverchair riff, which he immediately cut off. He was the only comedian of the night to take a swing at the elephant in the theatre - a quartet of filled opera boxes in the wings of the stage: "Who are these rich c---s?!" he declared before leading the audience in a choral middle finger only to discover who his target was: "Oh, wait, I know that guy ... we used to work at Hungry Jacks at Kotara."
It was the almost too-perfect Novocastrian gag, followed by James' hit musical comedy stylings and the rousing end to a show that set the bar for the next month of gigs scattered about the city.
"This is the best that the Comedy Festival has ever sold. Ever," organiser Andrew Milos told the Newcastle Herald on Friday, June 28, as the Festival launched. "And I think that's attributed to the fact that people just want to go out and enjoy a laugh.
"And now that the fact that the Comedy Festival and the comedy club exist, and audiences can see their repeat comedians coming back each time, they've got their favourites.
"This is Newcastle through and through. And it's showing off the talent that we have got and the talent that exists in Australia."
