I’ve never considered myself a cutthroat person, but on a Saturday evening at Roxy’s Kitchen and Bar, I killed a man—multiple men, technically—and a woman, using a paper plate.

It’s not particularly fun to kill the comic; the laughter dies out, everyone in the audience gets a hazy look behind their eyes and I was not doing it so confidently. Sheepishly, I would raise my paper plate, and a gong would ring out the performer’s demise. I wasn’t alone in my crimes, though. This was a group effort.

All Fight One Survives: The Gong Show feeds off your most unhinged, negative form when you just don’t find the comedian funny and want to rush them off stage. If you relate to that statement then this is definitely the show for you. Also if you’d like to confront your fear of confrontation, try this one on for size.

When you walk in, you’re given a paper plate. This is your murder weapon. On the plates there are many, affectionate, generous, warmhearted words of support written, such as “You have my permission to leave!”  or “I hope you have a day job!”

The show begins about ten minutes late, but when it starts, it takes off at high speeds.

Host Sasha Frank jumps on stage and explains how the show is structured. In a row, seven comedians have three minutes to give us their best work. The rules of the murder are simple: when you feel the comedian is boring you, or is simply not to your taste, raise your paper plate. When the MC sees five plates raised, a gong will chime out their ‘death’ (they leave the stage immediately, even if it’s the middle of their set). Relatively fine, until you realise the lights don’t dim all that much, and you have to keep your plate up until the gong chimes. The goal is clear: be harsh in your convictions, or do not convict at all. Or do as I did, and look away as you raise your plate. The shame isn’t so burning, then.

Before the madness however, opener Iain Pringle performed. You can’t paper-plate him off the stage, although I’m not sure you’d want to. Hilarious, a little shy, but full of energy And a Scottish accent to boot!

The show started off slow, kill-wise. Whether it was the nervousness or the strangeness of disrespecting someone on stage, the first two comedians got off scot-free. Both times, the host had to encourage us to kill, as we couldn’t actually wait out the full 3 minutes for every comedian out of kindness. That was a foreign concept, and a waste of time.

So the next few comedians came and went in quicker succession. People became more comfortable accessing their primitive side, silently heckling the comedians and asking for less. It felt a bit antisocial, but also strangely cathartic.

Not that you should go if you have a dark, vengeful thirst within yourself that needs to be quenched. Take a seat, Batman. Put the paper plate down.

It’s more about the honesty of performance – which is equally important to the performer as it is to an audience member. As someone who has never been to the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, this was a great way to sample multiple performing comedians and figure out what shows would be most enjoyable for me. Considering I laugh at almost anything, this was also an effective method to narrow down.

I’d think it would be a great opportunity for the comedians, also, to figure out what part of their routine is doing best, and what needs to be adjusted to better suit a wider audience. Either that or I’m feeling bad about my swift, merciless killings and am coping.

It certainly isn’t any indication, in my opinion, of which comedians are funnier than others – in fact, almost all the comedians had at least one plate raised. Rarely did they make it through the full three minutes. The confidence of any comedian is admirable, of course, but more so is the ability to face this kind of criticism head-on.

I hope it also encourages some of the performers to have a bit more faith in themselves; a few times, it seemed the performer hadn’t anticipated making it so far into the three minutes, and wasn’t prepared with a ton of great material. Learning to believe in oneself is a tough lesson, but an important one, and what better way to do it than through a harsh-as-hell comedy show audience? A few of them even gained a couple audience members for their own shows in the process, so it’s not all doom and gloom.

It's a fun time if you go with friends and are willing to laugh at yourselves as you tap into a murderous and vindictive spirit within you. It’s also a weirdly great social experiment, I found. It only takes one person raising their plate for others to crawl out of the woodwork. I’m sure there’s some deep, philosophical and psychological meaning here…

…But there’s no space for that in this room, so here I go, raising a paper plate.