Ben McKenzie: the Man in the Lab Coat

So said the Melbourne International Comedy Festival iPhone app. It seems they truly have embraced the way of the geek – if not entirely successfully.

Anyway, the Man in the Lab Coat will be out and about a lot this year, and while a new solo science show is still a little way off – there is one in the making, I promise! – there’s no shortage of opportunities to see me be funny.

The biggest news is that the Melbourne Museum Comedy Tour is back and bigger than ever! For the first time we have international tour guides, not six but nine performances, and no Ben McKenzie. Yes, it’s true, I am producing but not performing this year, but that just means someone else will be writing new dinosaur jokes for your edification! As well as the tour, there’s also Melbourne Museum Lunchtime Comedy, a Saturday lunchtime series science and history based comedy from some of the smartest stars of the Comedy Festival. The whole thing’s so big now that it deserves its own web site – so I’ve given it one. Head over to museumcomedy.com to find out who’s on when and where!

The main reason I won’t be doing jokes about dinosaurs is because I’ll be too busy doing jokes about dragons. Yes, the sell-out, literally underground hit of the Melbourne Fringe Festival, +1 Sword, returns for another season at Caz Reitops Dirty Secrets in Collingwood. If you’ve ever wondered what Dungeons & Dragons is all about, now’s your chance to wield a wand and swing a sword and learn everything you never knew you could know about the world’s first and most popular fantasy role-playing game. And if that’s not enough, for three nights only you can watch some of your favourite comedians from around the festival go on the archetypal monster-killing, treasure collecting adventure in the improvised show, Dungeon Crawl. You can find out lots more about the show over at my production company web site, Shaolin Punk.

Plus, I’ll be doing a few guest spots around the festival, including the comedy festival special edition of Political Asylum and the second Annual General Meeting of my old sketchtastic friends, the Anarchist Guild Social Committee. Details in the new and improved gigs list to the right, and on the Where and When? page.

So yeah – it’s a big festival for the Man. And there’s more news to come, so stay tuned!

It’s true: the Russian government is going to save us all from Apophis. No, not the Egyptian demon more properly known as Apep – or the alien Goa’uld of the same name, which seems more likely given the space-based context – but the asteroid, which made headlines five years ago when it was thought likely to kill us all. Since then the probability of that has been greatly reduced by subsequent observations, though wise minds are keeping an eye on it. The Russian collegium, though, doesn’t agree with the lower probability, and are hatching a “secret plan” to save us all from the fate of the dinosaurs.

My favourite thing about the article, though, is that Dr Permiov, spokesperson for the Russian collegium (or “science-council” as he describes it, which seems delightfully steampunk) assured citizens that “there won’t be any nuclear explosions,” and then that “everything will be done according to the laws of physics.” Does he have the option of not doing things according to physics? What does the collegium know that we don’t?

It’s time for new material, and this time the Man is getting a little rock. Watch out for