Comedy Roulette – Spin That Wheel.

The Comedy Festival is great for your average punter - we pick and choose what takes our fancy, but for all comedians hustling and bustling for big crowds so they can give up their day jobs, it can be a time-consuming task.

Hosts Olga Loitsenko and Kru Harale, together take the stage with clever introductory routines reflecting on the funny side of life in their quirky daily battles. They are hilarious together and as solo performers; they are engaging and are both quick off the mark with hecklers.

Their Comedy Roulette concept is cleverly devised to shake, rattle and roll, and showcase a smorgasbord of comedians; in a sea of festival funnies we see different talent every night. They improvise new material, prompted by the wheel, while offering snippets from their own shows to budding new audiences. The roulette wheel is a flat screen and voice activated. We are encouraged to yell loud “Spin that wheel” and it will in turn automatically spin and stop at a prompt, for example: “A self -help book title” or “Wrong things to say to a heart- broken friend” and/or “Absurd reasons to start a protest”.

It is a fun promotional tool - with comedians such as the dazzling Diana Nguyen, who offers hilarious raunchy material; Suraj Kolarkar loved working the crowd with great comeback lines; Samuel Gebreselassie, who is cool, great at building up his routine with story and throwing it back at you when you least expect it. Robyn Reynolds is a funky Brit who shook us up with some wacky tales combined with hysterical expletives. Nick Schuller is as dead pan as his fishing stories and very funny. Kashyap Swaroop flew into Melbourne from India, a clever talent full off jocular jibe about Australia.

It was an entertaining hour of choice material from some awesome talent at this year’s Melbourne Comedy Festival.

Flora Georgiou