Comedy Club Gets It: A stand-ups lab theatre

These four stand-up comedians were pretty crabby on stage. That one night they became crabbier still when the dreaded virus decided to do a favour to the stand-up comic art by dropping in on the four in the changing room. Its revenge hit them so hard they ended up in adjacent quarantine beds on an assigned RAN ship anchored off Melbourne's Crib Point.

How badly they were hit was like this: what they eventually saw there, in their sealed-off exercise area, was a deck very like a stage, with the Captain overlooking them from the bridge as an authority on all judgment. Between times, otherwise lashed quarantined to their cots, they hit upon using their outside exercise sessions to carry on their undying competition to who was the best. The deck there, their stage. The bridge, their scoreboard. The Captain, the at-long-last unbiased judge. The shoreline, the backdrop. The mud crabs there, their usual boozy patrons.

So said, this was how the muddies heard about... and could turn their beadies onto... the comedy club, itself - soon, soon only a resulting shell of its former self.