A smattering of TVO regulars will be appearing at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, starting next month.

Running from 25th March to 19th April, the festival offers Australian audiences over three weeks of top notch comic talent from around the world, and, much like Edinburgh Festival in Scotland each August, there’s so much to chose from, it can sometimes be hard to find the things you want to see.

Now, we are by no means suggesting that the following shows are the ONLY ones worth seeing. Far from it: part of the joy of these festivals is picking a name at random, or following up on someone who made you laugh once on someone else’s show, and investigating.

However for ease, here’s a mini run-down of TVO relevant shows you may want to get booking.

Most excitingly, MCIF gets to première Sarah Kendall‘s brand new show, A Day in October, which runs every day (except Mondays) from 26th March to 19th April.

The storytelling stand-up follows her work on previous shows by exploring another tale from her childhood: this time focusing on a pool party in 1989 that was so disastrous, the ramifications are still being felt today. It was a bad pool party.

The mighty Paul Foot brings his 2014 Edinburgh show, Hovercraft Syphony in Gammon # Major, to the festival for almost its entire duration.

Performing every day from 26th March to 19th April, except Mondays, Paul has become a cult favourite in Australia, and returns after rave reviews to stimulate minds with his brief case full of new rants and tall tales.

Also in for the duration, again performing every day from 26th March to 19th April, barring pesky Mondays, is Tony Law, who is bringing his 2014 Edinburgh show Enter the ToneZone to Australia for one final run.

Following a huge UK tour and a Soho Theatre residency, Tone offers magical shapes, an original song, some truly heart-breaking nonsense and brief tackling of world issues through the medium of dance.

To the delight of many of our readers, some time back Noel Fielding is bringing An Evening With Noel Fielding to Australia and New Zealand on tour, and this includes three nights at MICF, on 15th, 16th and 19th April.

As expected, Mike Fielding will be joining him for the show, which ran for a string of dates in the UK last year (and will return there this Autumn), and after some initial confusion, we can confirm that Tom Meeten is also back on board.

There’s tons of other great shows on offer, so we suggest maybe hitting the list here and booking as many as you can, but whilst we’re here, we’d also like to give a shout out to up and coming comic Alexis Simmonds, whose show Mist-Conceptions is taking place at The Tuxedo Cat.

A long-standing friend of TVO, Simmonds accompanied the gang to a truly riotous Fulchfest (and the subsequent pub adventures with some of our regular artists) during a brief stay in the UK a few years ago, and since then, she’s been forging her own comedic path. She’s one of us, and one of you, and it’d be great if you could go along and say hello.