Irma Modesto
Filipino comedian, Gb Labrador will travel all the way from the Philippines to represent the country in a show called “Comedy Zone Asia”. He will surely tickle the funny bones of this year’s participants to the Melbourne International Comedy Festival as it celebrates its 30th anniversary. Other comedians who will perform with him are: Daniel Fernandes from India, Sharul Channa from Singapore, Storm Xu from China and Andrew Chu from Hong Kong.
The Melbourne International Comedy Festival will be held from 23 March to 17 April 2016 at various venues like The Melbourne Town Hall, Melbourne Trades Hall, The Aetheneum Theatre and many other places around the Melbourne CBD.
Gb Labrador’s own brand of comedy
Co-founder of Comedy Manila, Gb Labrador is a conversational stand-up who makes you feel like you are hearing from an old friend, with inside jokes and yarns that catch you like a tickle. A featured comedian all over SE Asia, Gb currently writes sketch comedy for ABS-CBN and has been an Esquire Magazine Comedy Ambassador.
Growing in leaps and bounds
The idea to hold a comedy festival originated in 1980 and was formally launched by a press conference hosted by Barry Humpries. It started with 56 separate shows back then and starting on April Fool’s Day. It has grown in leaps and bounds and as of 2010 it has hosted 369 shows with 4,947 performances with both local and international performers from the UK, US, Canada and China.
Called the “world’s most powrful legal mood-enhancer”, revellers are promised “great swells of enjoyment”. The site says, “As tradition has it, this Festival, The People’s Festival’ doesn’t hold back when it comes to sharing the comedy. The young and the young at heart; the wealthy and the fiscally-challenged; the rabble-rousers and the do-gooders; the dirty jokers and the good, clean humorists. Absolutely everyone gets in on the joke.”
For more information about the comedy show, please visit: http://www.comedyfestival.com.au. Call 03 9245 3700 or email: info@comedyfestival.com.au.
A one-on-one interview with Gb Labrador
Irma Modesto: How long are you here for? Your first time in Melbourne?
Gb Labrador: Will be in Melbourne for the whole festival from March 19-April 19. It will be my first time in Australia.
Irma Modesto: You’ll gonna love Melbourne. I hope I get the chance to catch up with you and do a casual interview at the studio.
Really can’t wait to see Melbourne and all the acts from the festival. This is the biggest festival I’ll be part of. Thank you for this opportunity to be interviewed at your radio show. Would love to be part of it and share stories on how the stand-up scene in Asia is shaping and Philippines is really representing well over the region– we’re now about to step out of the insult type of comedy and we are now introducing point of view and observational stand-up to our local audience here in the Philippines.
IM: Oh good to hear, more intelligent material I say, always hated toilet humour and slapstick, but I guess yung masa yun ang gusto (but I guess that’s what the general public wants). Where do you get your material?
GL: We formed Comedy Manila in 2013 to help promote stand-up comedy in the Philippines. Since we started, we have done sold out shows at Universities and also went on the road and did shows in Cebu, Baguio, Olongapo and Ilocos– bringing awareness and laughter that we can be funny without doing insult comedy or toilet humor.
We have open mics every week to make sure we have a place to hone the art of writing original material — to bring out the original wit and creativity that every Filipino has in their body.
My material is a mix of day-to-day experience as a Filipino– as a commuter, having a big Filipino family, Philippine politics and a bit of social commentary– since our regular news and state of government is already hilarious.
IM: But I guess you’ll need some fresh material for when you get here? Not a lot of Aussies are familiar with Philippine politics. But having said that, what sort of audience would you be aiming at here? When you get to places abroad, you do fresh material about those places?
GL: I am working on new material since we are doing 22 shows at the festival What I’ve learned doing shows around the region is any kind of struggle or experience in life as long as the audience can relate to it or find interesting– the joke will be effective.
A Filipino joking about our state of government and why we’re not improving because we are doing too many fun runs to solve our problems always works at a foreign audience..
Family, relationship, growing up in the 80s is always a relateable material that works for me.
IM: When did you discover your comedic bend? Are you funny in real life, or is that just work? Some comedians are really dark in their day to day. How did you get involved in this year’s Comedy Festival…invited or registered?
GL: Share. People always ask about my name and they ask if it’s a stage name. It’s actually my real name. GB Stands for Gerard Benedict — My last name is Labrador which means Worker in Spanish– My dad is from Mina, Pototan Iloilo.
I just love to make people laugh and crack jokes about everything I see that is weird, funny and absurd– and it came to a point where I wanted to know if I can make strangers laugh with my jokes. When I did my first open mic– I fell in love with comedy even more. I kept writing to see what jokes I write will make my audience laugh.
Doing Stand-up in Manila is not that easy. We only get a few people in the audience, some of them are drunk or did not even came to watch stand-up, they were just there to eat or drink. So the training for Filipino comedians is a bit brutal compared to the other comedians in Asia where they have a proper audience to work with but our setup made our comedians more prepared with any kind of audience and more quick to the punchline because we had to win our audience fast or else they will leave the venue.
I was invited to be part of the festival. Thanks to the help of comedians I’ve worked with. The previous comedians in the festival Dr. Jason Leong Malaysia and Vivek Mahbubani recommended me to be part of this year’s festival. I’ve been doing stand-up around the region since 2010. Joined the 4th Annual HK Comedy Festival Stand-up Competition at possibly the wrong time since it was just after the Bus Hostage incident in Manila but was fortunate to win 1st Runner Up. Then after the HK festival– I got invited to do gigs around the region and have done shows in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia.
IM: Yea I know what you mean about the Filipino audience, still coming to terms with that one; it’s like it’s automatic, as soon as someone gets up there and grabs the mic, suddenly everyone decides to chat with friends…I really really find that rude and insulting. It’s like “helllo, someone’s trying to tell us something, will you just stop what you’re doing and listen?” And don’t even get me started on Pinoys talking at the top of their lungs…”am just here, no need to shout”.
GL: Yes, that’s why every time we go up on stage– we will need to explain the house rules but since 2008, there have been improvements. We are now getting our comedy audience but still we have people in the audience that need to be educated but its all part of growing the comedy scene.
Like Malaysia, the Philippines has the most number of local comedians and also has more local audience watching than expats.
That’s why we also refer to Comedy Manila as the Pinoy Stand-up Revolution.
IM: That’s excellent. What are your future projects?
GL
: I have regular shows with Comedy Manila. Right now the comedy scene in Asia is getting bigger and I’m really proud to say that the Philippines is actively part of the growing scene and is really representing.
Thank you Tita Irma for the time. Any time you want to talk about comedy. I’m just a Facebook message away.
IM: Thank you
GL: Thank you so much for this.
Gb Labrador will perform at the 30th Melbourne Comedy Festival from March 23 to April 17, 2016 at the Melbourne Town Hall. Tickets are available now at Ticketmaster.
