Comedy on Cue | Blah Blah Blah Improv

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One of the final events of the 2025 Undercover Artist Festival was Comedy on Cue by Blah Blah Blah Improv, a perfectly fun and silly night out to end to the festival. ​​Modelled after the TV show Whose Line Is It Anyway?, which arguably brought improv comedy to renown, the show’s five talented performers gave their all in a showcase of a range of popular and increasingly silly improv games to the delight of the audience.

In typical improv style, each of the games started with an introduction from the performances and a request for a random prompt from the audience. The prompts could be anything and included a type of food, a musical genre, a favourite sport. From this Blah Blah Blah Improv’s team of Mandy, Adam, Glenn, Tara and Javon created a completed improvised scene, while being accompanied by David Truong on the keys. Some of the games required regular audience interactions and inputs, including joining scenes, getting the performers to redo key moments and even joining in a completely improvised song (more on that later). The audience lapped up these opportunities to be involved, responding enthusiastically to each invitation from the performers to help them create each scene.

Image: PhotoCo

The games started quite simply, but got increasingly complex and outrageous as the show progressed. One of my favourites was the game ‘Moving People’, where two of the performers couldn’t move themselves at all and had to give increasingly difficult instruction to their pilot to guide their actions through the scene. The performers up looking like a couple of corrupted NPCs were trapped in a loop of trying to communicate with each other by bumping into each other over and over again. My other favourite was the game, “We Trained For This”, where the audience gave the ensemble the prompt to steal gum from a 7Eleven, and they had to flash back and forward through time to show how they’d both trained for and then attempted the robbery. Think Ocean’s 11 mixed with Inspector Clouseau, with a dash of Toy Story. Like all good improv, it’s impossible to explain, but the increasingly complicated and ridiculous scheme mixed with the physical comedy of the performers had the crowd roaring with laughter.

But it was the final game, Song Genres, that truly showed the skills of the Blah Blah Blah Improv team. Taking the prompt of ‘shopping for a tai chi teacher’, the team created a song on the spot, where each performer created their own verse in one of the song styles suggested by the audience. Mixing rock, rap, nursery rhymes, opera and a good old fashioned pop sing-a-long, they guided the audience into joining them in a multi-part harmony, complete with choreography, that became an ode to mindfulness and being in the moment. Not only did it feel safe to join-in, the audience enthusiasticly wanted to join them. The resulting final chorus had all the punters singing and swaying along to lyrics like ‘I feel calm, I feel fine’.

These positive self-affirmations, combined with all the laughs, left me feeling like I’d experienced a good session of therapy during Comedy on Cue. And it seemed like that was the same for many in the audience with all the smiles I saw on the punters faces as they left the theatre.

With an emphasis on fun, inclusity, interactivity and a whole lot of silly, Comedy on Cue made for a great night out and a great end to the 2025 Undercover Artist Festival that the audience thoroughly enjoyed and felt part of. If you’re in need of some good belly laughs, a bit of escapism, a whole lot of ridiculous and even a bit catharsis, make sure to check out Blah Blah Blah Improv’s next show when it hits town.

Comedy on Cue played 26 September 2025 at the Diane Cilento Theatre as part of the 2025 Undercover Artist Festival.

Image: PhotoCo