It’s been a busy month for me, as you might imagine, what with four shows in the Comedy Festival and appearances in others. As well as +1 Sword, Dungeon Crawl and the Museum Comedy programme – all of which are going very well, by the way – this Friday is one of the special ones: the Political Asylum Comedy Caucus, two hours of top-notch topical political stand-up from our regular team, plus Rod Quantock and a special international guest (I’ll give you a hint: he’s from New York). On top of all that, it was my birthday, my Mum’s come for a visit, my beloved opened her smashing new cabaret show (First Against the Wall), and I’m still working three days a week.

Hardly surprising then that I’ve not blogged much; I’ve hardly had time to catch up to my beloved in Dragon Age: Origins (which is better than Mass Effect, I think). I had to break my busy silence though to celebrate, because it’s been a good month for science!

First, the Large Hadron Collider has been turned on. It’s been a long time coming, and the world hasn’t ended; indeed the press didn’t seem to notice until it was all over. Now, of course, we have to look at the data that the various sensors and arrays and detectors have collected, and see what it tells us about the Universe. It’s going to be an exciting few years…

It’s also been a good month for Simon Singh. In 2008, he mentioned in an opinion piece in The Guardian that he felt certain chiropractic treatments promoted by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) were “bogus”. For his trouble, he was sued – successfully, in the first instance – by the BCA under the UK’s harsh libel laws. This week? He won an appeal, and what’s more, the appeal court judges were very critical of the BCA’s behaviour – it looked like it was trying to “silence one of its critics” – and of the original judge, who has “marginalised or underrated the value now placed by the law on public debate”. Read more about it in The Telegraph.

In a similar vein, the University of East Anglia scientists whose emails were stolen and publicised as “Climategate”, which supposedly revealed the “truth” behind the “Anthropogenic Global Warming conspiracy”, were cleared by a parliamentary enquiry. The response recognises that they could have been more open in sharing their data, but most of it was already publicly available and the methods for obtaining and analysing it published. They had a culture of “stonewalling” critics at the university, but then when the majority of requests for your data are from people hoping to undermine your research, that might be forgiven… The main point, though, was that plenty of other institutions have come to the same conclusions from data, so even if they had falsified anything, other research still rejects any notion of a conspiracy.

Those are my reasons for a good month. I’ll talk about them some more, with more jokes in, on Friday night. Maybe I’ll see you there?

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!

The Melbourne Museum Comedy Tour finished a few short weeks ago, but in some ways it feels like an age. Six nights of sold out marlarkey! I should also mention that we received a small number of lovely reviews, including the Groggy Squirrel and Richard Watts of The Age.

Thank you to Janet A. McLeod and Andy Muirhead, my fellow science comedians; to Bernard Caleo and all the staff and volunteers at the Museum; to Gail Miller, my fearless co-producer; and of course to everyone who bought tickets and came to see the show. For those of you who missed out, don’t despair – I suspect we will be back! You can keep your eye on the blog to find out when and where.

And don’t forget, National Science Week is coming up in August – if not before, you’ll see the Man in the Lab Coat again then, doing…something. In the meantime, now that festival madness has abated, I will be writing a few more blog posts, and there are other projects in the works too. I’ll be around a bit more!

I’m popping up in a few places this week, so look out if you’re up for a dose of enthusiastic science geekery!

Matt Smith – no, not the new Doctor, but the lovely man putting together The Pun’s PunCast interviews – spoke to me the other day about the Melbourne Museum Comedy Tour, the Anarchist Guild Social Committee and Graeme Garden. It was excellent fun, and I hope you’ll enjoy listening to our conversation, which you can find in PunCast Episode 9.

Also, if you’re in Melbourne, be sure to tune in to Channel 31 on Monday, April 20 for Yartz, where the irrepressible (but no less lovely than Matt Smith) Ralph McLean asked me the hard questions about dinosaurs at Melbourne Museum. This one will probably also end up on YouTube, I’m told – I’ll be sure to link to it when it does!

Speaking of the tour, you do all know that it begins this Thursday (April 16), right? And that the first week is nearly sold out? Book your tickets now or get them at the door (there are still a few left for Friday and Saturday), and we’ll see you there!

It’s been an action-packed first week of the Comedy Festival, not least because it culminated in my 30th orbit round the sun. As we head off on another elliptical, gravity-powered journey, I think back on the last thirty years in wonder. Who knows where we’ll be in 2039?

Let’s focus on a smaller interval of time, though. First, I must report that the first night (Thursday April 16) of the Melbourne Museum Comedy Tour has sold out! A couple of the other nights look set to go the same way, so be sure and book (via comedyfestival.com.au) to avoid missing out. Watch out for myself and the other tour guides popping up in various media over the next week or so, as well!

I’m also appearing in the Anarchist Guild Social Committee show, A Fine Selection, on April 12 and 19. This may well be the last hurrah for these sketches, so come see them while you can!

If like me you’re not just a science geek but geeky in general, you may enjoy my column for Comedy Festival paper The Pun. It’s titled Ben McKenzie’s Geek Comedy and it’s about…well, geek comedy! The first article explains everything so don’t be afraid.

Finally, for those who don’t know, your favourite lab coat wearing man about town can now be found talking nonsense on Twitter. No, not Rob Morrison: me! Find me under the fairly obvious user name labcoatman, where you can read what I’m seeing at the festival and watch me exchange nonsense with my friends and celebrities I don’t know – par for the course, really.