Garry Starr wins Most Outstanding Show award at Melbourne International Comedy Festival

A one-man clown show about Penguin Classics has won MICF 2025's Most Outstanding Show award; a range of other comedians were also awarded.
MICF 2025 award winners group photo; Garry Starr (aka clown Damien Warren-Smith) reclines at the front.

Garry Starr: Classic Penguins, which ArtsHub awarded a coveted five stars, describing it as “hilarious, in-your-face and flawless“, has taken out Melbourne International Comedy Festival’s (MICF) highest honour.

Accepting his Most Outstanding Show award, Damien Warren-Smith began by saying a “massive thank you to Laura Milke-Garner, my producer. She saw my first ever show in Adelaide back in, like, 2018, and she said, ‘We should work together’ and, yeah, we haven’t stopped since. So a huge thank you.”

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Richard Watts OAM is ArtsHub's former National Performing Arts Editor; he also presents the weekly program SmartArts on Three Triple R FM. Richard is a life member of the Melbourne Queer Film Festival, a Melbourne Fringe Festival Living Legend, and was awarded the 2019 Sidney Myer Performing Arts Awards' Facilitator's Prize in early 2020. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Green Room Awards Association in 2021, and a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in June 2024. Photo: Fiona Hamilton. Follow Richard on Bluesky @richardthewatts.bsky.social and Instagram @richard.l.watts