Melbourne International Comedy Festival: Nina Conti's explorations in chaos

Three people are up on the stage with ventriloquist Nina Conti, wearing masks with moveable jaws that clack as she puts words into their plastic mouths. There's a ladder on stage for no particularly good reason, an inflatable banana and a guitar that Anna, a homeopathist, was induced to play earlier in the show. Paul, a data analyst who could barely bring himself to speak when addressed from the stage, has been so transformed by the mask that he is now trying to clobber a stranger with a pair of yellow maracas. We're teetering on the edge of chaos here and everyone, including Conti, is absolutely loving it.

Twelve years ago, Conti started doing a ventriloquism show with Monkey, a grimly depressed creature who sat on the end of her arm and made jokes about simian life. Monkey is still with her, but he's gone freeform; for his mistress, the idea of working to a script now seems too dull. "I'm more into exploring this chaos. Even two years ago, one year ago, I was thinking, 'Yes, but what will happen? What if it's not OK?' Now, the more I do it, the more I realise it's hard to fail as long as you're optimistic. Some nights it just spirals away from me horribly, but it's enjoyable regardless."

Her show is entirely improvised, although there is a loose format. First up, grumpy Monkey talks to people in the first few rows to find likely candidates for what is to come. Conti is winningly sweet, but Monkey isn't: he berates people for being dull or asks companions if they're having sex. Nobody seems unduly upset. Over the years, she says, she has come to realise the truth of her mentor Ken Campbell's advice when she started: that ventriloquism is potentially the most subversive art because the puppet can say anything. "Because he's not real. It doesn't mean I think whatever it is; the thought occurred in my head but it doesn't have to be my opinion. It's just out there."

But it is when these mild-mannered laymen come on stage that Conti's skill and wit become a kind of magic. The anonymity of the mask seems not only to set them free, but given them secret powers: Conti picks up on what they do and gives them lines, but they often seem to anticipate her. "I think people pick up on cues a lot because they don't know what to do," she says. "Then they come up with wonderful things, like Paul tonight with the fight. But if they do nothing, that's OK too – it's up to me to make it work."

When she first started using masks a few years ago, she had a stooge in the audience. "It worked great, but it was cheating. Then one night my stooge couldn't come, so I had to pick someone from the audience and it was immediately 100 per cent funnier; it was just much more alive." She feels the sheer randomness of the show is a kind of safety net.

"Thinking ahead is the enemy. If you're not trying to force a pre-conceived idea on to it, it's much better. It's impossible for nothing to happen, if you think about it. I mean, how long can nothing happen for? And then that will be funny, eventually."

The trickery of ventriloquism isn't what interests her; she isn't even bothered any more if her lips move (although, as far as I could see, they never do). "I feel in a way I've moved beyond that," she says. "It's really all about having fun and letting it evolve to weird places."

Conti has a large and enthusiastic following now, but that hasn't erased ventriloquism's musty variety-show image; she once said she felt she had about 20 seconds to win over an audience once she had the monkey out of his bag. Comedy's self-appointed purists also disapprove of her, she says, because she uses a prop rather than just her wits. "But it's an unexplored art form really," she says. "You can do anything with ventriloquism. It doesn't have to just be jokes. It's just like another pen, isn't it?"