International Stand-Up Comic David O'Doherty's Guide To Melbourne Comedy Festival

Last year, at a show called Lessons With Luis in a small room upstairs in Melbourne's Town Hall, I laughed so hard that a tiny bit of wee came out. Not so much that anyone would notice, but it definitely happened. In my defence, I'd done a very long podcast with Pete Holmes that afternoon and drunk lots of water. But that's not an excuse. It happened because in one part of the show, Luis's brother looked down the lens of a camera and the expression on his face was so funny, it made my brain momentarily forget its evolutionary priorities and 50,000 years of human domestication. It was brilliant.

I don't know anything about stand-up comedy. I've been doing it for 15 years, obsessively thinking about it for most of that time. But still when somebody asks me for a tip about how it works, or to name a single thing I've learned, my mind goes like the clouds desktop background on Windows 98.

Laughter, like farting and racism, just comes out of people who are prone to it. My main weakness as a comedian is that I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT OTHER PEOPLE FIND FUNNY. I could fill this page with recent killer punchlines and ideas that have received zero response from otherwise excellent groups of strangers. (Examples include: 'Sylvia Platypus', something about farting into a 3D printer and a joke about a bureaucratic ghost.) 

And that's the other thing I remember about the Lessons With Luis show: as I sat there in my damp rapture, the person beside me was completely unmoved. She wasn't even smiling.

This festival is overwhelming. Flyers will be flyered, posters will be postered, lines of stars will be photocopied and stuck to them as if stars were not celestial and infinite, but out of five and from a website you've never heard of. Reviews will bandy words like 'genius' and 'harrowing' and people will post furious internet comments in the middle of the night that begin “YOU OBVIOUSLY…” But none of this is the point of this festival.

Pick up a copy of the festival programme. Go Dead Poets Society on it. Start tearing out pages for shows that look lame. Put circles around things that are promising. Disregard who has paid for big ads or who has wangled themselves into the fancy venues. Those things mean nothing. Talk to your most trusted confidants. I promise that there are at least five shows in this festival that you will really like. But there is one, somewhere in that programme that will make wee come out of you. Finding that show is the point of this festival.

GOOD LUCK!