How well will Australian humour go down in this city especially when administered in large doses? We're about to find out: the Melbourne International Comedy Festival Roadshow, comprising five of Australia's best known comics, is coming to the Fringe Club this week to make its Hong Kong debut.
The Roadshow, which has been going for 11 years, aims to offer a taste of one of the biggest comedy festivals in the world to those who are unable to get to Melbourne for the four weeks commencing in March or April for which it runs.
According to Susan Provan, director of the now 25-year-old festival, the annual jamboree is open to all Australian artists who pay a registration fee. Her office will produce and curate a programme, and provide marketing support. It now features about 380 events over a four-week period. The Roadshow sets off on tour around the country's other cities and towns each year after the curtain comes down on the festival proper.
It has also visited Singapore, and will be heading there again after, we are assured, six nights of hilarity at the Fringe.
We were supposed to be in on the act sooner. Fringe Club founder and director Benny Chia Chun-heng and Provan are old friends and they have been working towards this series of shows for several years, but this is the first for which dates could be agreed to suit all parties.
Many of the biggest names in Australian comedy got their first big breakthrough at the festival's three 'development programmes': Raw Comedy, an open mic competition; Class Clowns, a competition for aspiring comics still of school age; and Deadly Funny, which features 'the best up-and-coming indigenous stand-up comedians in Australia'.