Review of Australia's premier new act competition

New act competitions are inevitably more about spotting potential than finding a fully-formed talent. But sometimes a fledgling comedian is so assured in their persona that they feel like the finished article already, at least in the short sets they are given.

So it is with Joshua Khoury, the stand-out winner of the Raw Comedy competition at Melbourne International Comedy Festival yesterday. The Sydneysider is an excellent writer of quirky jokes, serving up one hilarious gag after another, all off-kilter but grounded in real observations on anything from baby talk to sugar daddies or edgier content such as The Human Centipede and OJ Simpson.

He’s in command of his delivery, unfazed by the huge venue and presenting his absurd takes as if they were entirely reasonable, and with an instinctive ear for comic cadence. This original thinker – who wins a trip to the Edinburgh Fringe as his prize – will go far.

Meanwhile, runner-up gongs went to Jake Zukerman and Jorgia Rice, both from Melbourne. In an oversized jacket, like a parody of an 1980s stand-up, Zuckerman, too, dealt in weird one-liners and offbeat stories. He exudes a slightly druggy vibe, but with jokes tight enough to suggest he can’t be that spaced-out. The late Mitch Hedberg would be a role model. Although, unsurprisingly, Zuckerman’s not at that level yet, he achieves a solid gag rate.

Rice leans into her status as a nerd, the former library monitor now hooked on regional AM radio. She has inventive material on her surname, how she sleeps and some late-20s white women tropes she finds herself slipping in to – although a routine about a cockatoo leaning on the first syllable of that word for maximum innuendo was a bit cheap. The calmness of her delivery enhances her material, as she exudes quiet confidence.

Rewind to the start of the gig, with Canberra’s Aidan Mungai getting proceedings off to a robust start, especially with his impersonation of the death metal he enjoys, and an amusing explanation about its place outside the mainstream. However his material about the Ripstik divided the room, as he didn’t explain the skateboard variant well enough for those of us who didn’t grow up with it.

Sydney comedian Effie Tan was stilted in her delivery, but she’s a solid writer and relaxed a little – if not completely - as her material did its work. She speaks of Gen Z concerns, believing AI might not be the existential threat that some fear and explaining why her cohort do not want to be mothers. Some of the punchlines were low-hanging fruit, and she needs time to develop more, but there’s clear promise here.

Mae McCubbin studied drama and wants you to know it… as if it weren’t obvious from the very stage-school vibes of her very performative delivery, coming from safely behind the fourth wall. Her song about those theatre classes is jaunty and entertaining but a bit in-jokey… it will be nice to see where she ends up once her horizons expand.

Sadly, Elias Jambula had a shocker, taking her stoner-style delivery to extremes by starting stories about her time as a teenage model without apparently knowing where they were supposed to be heading. 

While projecting a well-defined image of a grubby loser who sleeps in his car and struggles to hold down a job, Lachlan Skinner’s writing was a little too formulaic to get the best out of it. And there may well have been no reason for him to end with a bit of beatboxing, but it’s clear to see why he’d want to show it off – he’s very good at it.

Brandon Duff’s got musical chops, too, and served up an engaging number that adapted the sultry energy of an r&b track for a sexually awkward white guy. Flight Of The Conchords have been here before, but Duff’s paean to the vanilla approach was witty in its own right. I think he might consider himself unlucky not to be placed.

Tilly Harrison has promise, but her greenness shows. Being polyamorous and queer is no longer a USP and she needs to drill a little deeper into the experience to find the funnies. But her surprisingly woke grandmother comes across as an intriguing character and the Adelaide comic understands the power of sparingly used repetition.

As a Frenchman who’s been living in Brisbane for the past two years, Antoine Bassetto has some playful takes on Aussie stereotypes - including some sacrilegious ragging on Vegemite – while emphasising some Gallic ones of his own, such as being very precious about the venerated croissant. But he shuns any clichés of being haughty, instead being a people-pleaser who can’t help chatting to Uber drivers. Again, a bit more depth would not go amiss, but an outsider’s perspective is always welcome.

Hobart’s Joshua Pilley spoke of the image of accountants being stiff, and rather proved the point with a wooden delivery that felt overly scripted. Gags often were too laboured - explaining why sex is like a Qantas flight, for example – and frequently fell into the same pattern of placing a deliberate, unnatural pause mid-sentence before redirecting it, but only slightly.

Finally, Jack Russell had plenty of jokes about that being his real name. That could have felt like thin pickings, but he exploited it well, getting more out of the premise than you might think. And he had a great gag about Melbourne’s myriad milk options compared to his more straightforward Darwin hometown. A couple of slightly too-obvious gags aside, this was a robust note on which to end the  final.

• In the Deadly Funny competition for First Nations comedians, also held over the weekend, One Silly Ring from Western Australia was awarded first place with Gary Hamaguchi (WA) and Birriga (NSW) given a special commendations.

Review date: 13 Apr 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival