bedlam updates

Last night I saw my friend Simon Keck do his show Eating Tiger Dicks. He's sort of ultra cerebral and filthy, moralising and warm hearted, all that good shit. As a comic he tries to do hard things, not gimmicks or anything he's dumbed down for safety, though there's no reason he couldn't be a mass appeal pop entertainer doing exactly what he's doing. I hate him. Spoiler alert: I am not going to describe the show at all. It's comedy. Comedy is Jesus. It's great to see a comic talk properly about what he's really interested in, no matter what it is, in such an unaffected yet clearly passionate way. And he's super fucking gross. My God. And in a really good way that doesn't exclude anyone. When he drops invented six letter swear words it's shared joy, not some fucked up hammer of shock. I hate him. Anger without warmth is just bitterness. I wouldn't call Simon Keck an angry comic, but there is that kind of anger underneath that com...

Last week at one of my favorite comedy rooms a shit storm was born and it shows no sign of dying down. What began as a very funny joke was completely misread by a person who then hijacked the room by making a really weird, irritating stand and got so under the performer's skin he was rude to her. The list of comics who would have utterly demolished this person is, I'm guessing, all comics. Her behaviour was reprehensible, but because she thought she was fighting for a cause and because she and her friends are in fact monstrous bullies with a lot of power their ludicrous take on things made it into a major Melbourne paper with the nightmare words, "Comedian Ray Badran tells audience member to 'die' for objecting to rape joke". I've spoken with several people who were in the room, particularly a feminist woman whose appraisal of the heckler's behaviour was purely scornful. The heckler was a piece of shit and this was proved when her and her friends use...

My last post was about how soul crushing the Festival has been, this one is about what a properly great time I am having doing The Wrong Show and The After Party.  A man said my face looks like his mother's vagina. A woman pulled down her pants to reveal great big fucking capital letter W's tattooed on her buttocks. This same woman was the best racist I've met in ages. Some shitfuck hecklers dropped 50 bucks on the ground so me and me mate picked it up and went to the Golden Tower to spend it all on booze and fried food. The spots at The After Party have been a delight. You just have to know how to handle that room. Last year I got into an argument with three drunk women just before I did my spot and went on to do nothing but crumble into ash. That year I begged awful bogan men to fuck me in the arse and bellowed at others to shut the fuck up. About halfway through the festival I cracked the code and started doing proper comedy. I'm not sure why now, but I wasn'...

Monday means no comedy and that means a well earned break from going to The Red Violin at 14 McKillop Street day after day to cancel my show. I cannot tell you what a rush it has been to not do stand up. A dream run. I hope it's a fucking dream anyway. Because I don't know how "really good at cancelling shows" will look on my resume. But it's going to be okay. Opening night was awesome, we nailed our opening ten minutes of introducing ourselves then took turns doing the stand up things and the stage felt like being in the womb. So it's been great to not do that at all for the following three nights. But it's going to work out. If you stand at the Town Hall and look up at the big map the Melbourne International Comedy Festival displays you'll see something quite interesting: our motherfucking street isn't on it. A street that is 5 minutes walk from where you are standing,  with a festival hub running 12 shows, a place with multiple bars and a...

Tomorrow our show starts in a venue that has an old fuck maze on the top floor. It's sort of like a haunted house, but the ghosts are cum. The place is huge, multi-levelled, there are a lot of shows and up above us is a series of tiny rooms splattered in historic cum from Melbourne's fuck maze past. We have unwittingly walked into a 21 night stand in Melbourne's most interesting venue. Haven't we just. I like the place.   The place is rather amazing, really. It would make a dream comedy hub and I hope that happens and that no one ever goes upstairs with a UV light to map out the intricate lacework of cum in the place up there that is some kind of fuck maze. I am not saying that a visit to see our show will get cum on you. It won't. We're not performing on the cum level. But you may breathe in cumdust from the 1980's. See you there guys! Tickets to Two Bearded Ladies    

During this year's Melbourne International Comedy Festival I am going to drink as much as I can without ruining my show, which I have to able to perform 21 times at the top of my ability. I also have to go out fliering for hours every day. What this means is I won't be able to drink as much as I would like to in my fucked up little heart. What this means is I need to have goals and a point and a mission with clear objectives. Drinking goals. There's no point pretending I'm not going to go out and and get royally fucked up. That is definitely going to happen. However I won't be doing any pills and powders because I can't afford the comedown, which can be pretty suicidal. Even the closing party is a bad choice for drugs because the end of the festival provides a comedown of it's own that needs to be managed like the brain damage it is. What I want more than anything is to have a ball this year, but not so much that I am trying to do comedy or give flie...

So after sitting through twenty-odd minutes of advertising after paying twenty dollars to see a movie an old lady sits nearby in the nearly empty cinema and begins unwrapping Christmas presents. I think. For the length of the screening I didn't look in case razors shot out of my eyes and decapitated this human being with feelings and her own story. Jupiter Ascending began and I was hating it in record time. A voiceover delivered by a woman we soon see holding a toilet brush very close to her to face walks the audience through the first meeting of her parents who are the Cutest Couple Ever. Only the sudden death of one of these fluff farts kept me in my seat. I so was close to bailing out to head home and rage blog about the Wachowskis final unmasking as people swimming in vats of taste destroying money. What happened? Do I need to watch the Matrix again to learn that it's actually not good? Maybe I won't do that. Maybe I'll pick up where that guy in the USA left off a...

So a group of boys were taking turns holding me still and punching me in the stomach as passing adults walked by pretending they didn't have eyes. Here I am copping this as part of an after school program run by the Lord of the Flies and these parents are rolling past with their own children, teaching by example the magic of temporary blindness. Let's arbitrarily choose this as the moment my problems with crowds of polite adults started. Any one of those people could have played the grown up card and shut down what was happening but they didn't. Why? Because most people presented with an emergency go all soft and will be turned to ash when Jesus returns with his laser sword. Hi I'm Sean and I have a myriad of issues that have gradually hardened into a set of attitudes and beliefs about how the world works and how I will rule it after the Apocalypse. Well, my neighbourhood really, which I will enslave in an act of pragmatic self-care. As a very damaged unit whose...

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/bytestories/family-related-tragicomedy_b_6690126.html That link goes to the Huffington Post, where a couple of my Byte Stories are making an appearance. It's pretty exciting. The Byte Stories thing appeared at just the right time, because leading up to the festival I'm finding writing true stories is a pretty slick way to crank out material to then filter through the joke consideration process. I grew up in a pretty basic suburb, not poor, but with the threat of violence pretty much a constant and writing these stories has been sort of therapeutic in some ways. I did need to stop for a few days though, to take a break from thinking about things I can't change. It's good to put traumatic events into words, but it also stirs up some unpleasant feelings. There is no escape. That's the lesson of my basic suburbs. You've got to find ways to make the most of fucked situations, face them head on and hope to fuck you have enough mag...

So I wrote a little thing that's sort of a window into how I got fully involved in activism: Occupy Melbourne: Week One On Saturday I stayed home and did social media as my mob visited an Air Show that is really an arms fair. They were all tossed out of the event just as they were about to drop a big banner off a fighter jet, but the point was made. I was sent this image from the show. It was too perfect and all I had to do was put in Picmonkey to add some text. This is the first year of a campaign to #DisarmAvalon2017 and with shit like this going it shouldn't be too hard: I sacrificed an opportunity to leave the house that night and visit friends to unwind. Instead I got my hands on all the images and video from the day and knocked out a video. As always, working in a window of just hours means my videos may never win any awards, but the plus side is I get it done and get on with my life. Here's what I made in roughly 2 hours of fevered editing: In that B...