Dilruk Jayasinha makes his life a soap opera at Melbourne International Comedy Festival

What nuggets of wisdom or silliness have the nation’s comedians uncovered in the pandemic year?

Dilruk Jayasinha at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

Melburnians, in Arj Barker’s words, are out on parole, unmasked but not entirely free. At the Melbourne Town Hall for the comedy festival, there are carefully wrangled queues, bag checks, QR check-ins and schoolroom seating procedures. Pull up your socks, tuck your shirt in.

Still, I don’t think I have ever been this hungry for stand-up. It’s partly to do with last year’s festival being cancelled, but I’m also curious about how people coped with the enforced hibernation. I want to hear clever, creative people drilling down on their experiences and finding nuggets of pure truth.

Dilruk Jayasinha is as good, and reliable, a guide as any. His experiences of the past 14 months run the gamut. Declared an essential service for the Adelaide Fringe last February, the comedian was subject to COVID house arrest and regular police checks during his stay. His 111-day lockdown back in Melbourne was far tougher: isolated, unattached and far from family. Jayasinha made a single call for help. He chose Lifeline because the number was two digits away from Pizza Hut’s delivery number.

Comedian Alice Tovey has a new show called Doggo

That’s a classic Jayasinha manoeuvre, breezily daisy-chaining this show, Victorious Lion, to his 2019 show about his 35kg weight loss and also to an unwritten sequel: “How I messed up my new relationship” or whatever else is coming. Jayasinha’s life is a soap opera one can dip into at leisure and be treated to both a recap and preview.

Jayasinha — “rich, intelligent, ethnic” — says anyone can be a comedian. We outsource our comedy because we “can’t be arsed”.

But I reckon it’s more about our inability to tickle ourselves. Jaya­sinha’s humour is genetically modified humblebrag, tumbling and delightful. It’s an emulsion of self-confidence and self-deprecation. With his relentlessly happy voice and Rowan Atkinson eyebrows, his delivery is brilliantly agile. We love his wins — big and small — as if they were our own. And he can always be relied on to roll up his sleeves (and pinch his nose) and dig deep for the most intractable of nuggets.

Alice Tovey’s shows are formally experimental and entirely unique. They are song cycles, art-rock cabarets and legit plays. The earliest foregrounded radical feminism and political fury. Those forces now quake beneath the surface. Tovey’s latest show, Doggo, is a skittish tribute to her four-legged loved ones, in songs and sketches.

It’s rough around the edges — an uneasy mix of highbrow and no-brow — and doesn’t ever land a knockout blow, but it’s a highly imaginative and original piece.

Some of her lyrics are scintillating. Tovey warns prospective dog owners to keep money aside “for euthanasia … and hip dysplasia”. Then she’ll glibly rhyme “time” with “time” and chide herself for it. Some of her songs come with footnotes: a rapid-fire aside about Helios’s granddaughter Medea is funnier than the joke it purports to explain.

And there’s some fair-dinkum wisdom about emotions “cos-playing” as hate.

Tom Ballard... We are All in This Together

Tom Ballard elevates angry, frustrated, impotent ranting to truly heroic levels in We are All in This Together, “a show for godless heathens”. It’s a cluster bomb of jaw-dropping factoids, rabble rousing and caustic observations about structural racism, climate change and the left-right divide. When the revolution comes, Ballard will be the audience warm-up act or first to the wall.

Dilruk Jayasinha, Lower Town Hall, Melbourne, until April 18; Comedy Store, Sydney, April 24. Alice Tovey, Butterfly Club, until Sunday; Factory Theatre, Sydney, May 7. Tom Ballard, Melbourne Town Hall, until April 18; Comedy Store, Sydney, May 7 and 8.