Refringeration; quick, dirty, and under-linked, sorry
Sarah Kendall spent her evening making occasionally obvious but generally well-executed jokes about sexism in modern culture, fairytales, and trying to raise a daughter in light of the above. Didn't quite gel with the audience, but the sequel to The Ugly Duckling at the end was masterful. (The swan gets plastic surgery, a career in modelling, a nasty birdseed habit and, without giving too much away, revenge; I really want to see the illustrated storybook.)
Gordon Southern is always reliable as a furriner gone native enough that he can make additions to his act with local slang rather than just translations. Predictably, a show called "A Brief History of History" ran overtime. Apparently he had a lot of material... Hopelessly Eurocentric, but you've got to cut something out. And given the quality of his German and Spanish accents, I'd hate to see what he'd have done with the rest of the world's.
Adelaide's Best Break-Up Revenge had a great writeup in the programme, clever marketing, did what it said on the tin, and more importantly had a title beginning with A-it's both an injustice and a mystery why it wasn't sold out. The comedian, A.J. Rae, is local, I really want to see more from her.
Tessa Waters claimed to be doing a show about happiness. I was expecting platitudes and half-understood psychology readings. Instead she came on stage in a leotard with professional gold sequins in a pattern on the front, and decidedly unprofessional gold sequins spelling out the word ART on the back, at which point she could have spent her hour reading aloud from Chicken Soup from the Soul for all I cared: I was sold. Platitudes there in fact were, but there were more bizarrely enthusiastic late-80's dance moves. And not even the predictability to rickroll us.
Bob Slayer had posters up proclaiming his banishment from Perth and Adelaide with one last, free gig before he left, so naturally curiosity made me go even though a moment's thought would have told me the reasons were probably sordid and banal. And they were: it turned out he was kicked out of his Perth venue for drunken sexual harassment and his original Adelaide venue for drunkenly badmouthing his promoter in a blog post (memory may be failing me here). The gig itself was the kind of disjointed drunken ramble that can only end with either an apparently miraculous drawing-together of the threads in a brilliantly witty, unexpected, and perfectly-clocked climax (Diane Spencer, where are you when we need you?) or by fizzling out into an indefinite drone until the comedian runs out of time and/or audience. Slayer went for the second one. For all that, it wasn't a bad gig: he had a gift for working with the audience, a rubber face, and a quick wit when forced to improvise; but I'm grateful I didn't have to give the sod money to find that out.
Jon Brooks, by contrast, was too mediocre to even hold in contempt. He tossed the word "cunt" around loosely enough I was starting to get a modest head of hate going, but then he gave the game away by admitting he was trying to prove a (misguided) point about misogyny in Australia. (Really, I should have picked it from the beginning when his inevitable Rudd/Gillard jokes were all on Rudd. This was, incidentally, the sum total of his political material and probably the best stuff he had overall.)
After him, I decided to sod my wallet and the train home and walk into the first group late show going - they couldn't all be rubbish, could they?
No, but most of them sure as hell could. I'd name all the shit ones if I remembered, but that's effort they haven't earned, so: Moataz Hamde shone out as the main exception-I'd seen him several times before at local gigs, and it'd be really heartening the way he's visibly improved at every one, but for the fact that every other comic I saw tonight was older, more experienced, and rubbish. So, yeah, talent matters. Chris Knight was also an honourable exception, to the extent that he delivered dull material reasonably well and I thought it'd be rude to just walk out on him; I pretended to have gotten an urgent message instead. (The mobile phone is such a wonderful invention.)
Oh, and I made my train, because it left late. So I can only conclude that the best performance of that night was TransAdelaide's (with Womad on top of the Fringe, you didn't want people stuck in town because their watches were five minutes slow.)
Pat Burtscher has the worst comedy-show title of the Fringe ("Patapotamoose"? Really?) but, well . . . Jon Brooks had plenty of material (not necessarily good material, but material nonetheless), but too little talent to get much out of it; Burtscher, on the other hand, had very little material, and certainly none prepared in advance, but talent to fucking burn, with a serious gift for a good non sequitur, which he alternated with stretching jokes past the point they were no longer funny to the point mere duration and bravado make them hilarious.
Ross Daniels had a hypocritically slick show about growing up punk in Brisbane under that prick Joh's iron gumboot. Apart from neatly demonstrating the general difference between a one-man play and a stand-up show, he did a fine turn flipping between playing himself, his own grandparents, Molly Meldrum and a couple of distinctly porcine cops. Could have done without the dream sequence at the end, though.
Danielle Deckard's America. (The punctuation is part of the title, and Deckard's the kind of singer/songwriter where you can be pretty sure she put serious thought into that full stop...) I had higher expectations of this show than was perhaps reasonable, but really, is it so much to ask to reach deeper with choices of cover songs than just sorting one's iTunes library by title and cross-referencing with the atlas? Apart from when she broke with the theme and sang her own material, the only remotely surprising thing we heard was some Ryan Adams. (Though I hadn't realised that the DKs had had their work cut out for them trying to make 'Viva Las Vegas' more cynical than it was already.) Her band was competent but, except on 'Streets of Philadelphia', almost entirely superfluous.
All this makes it sound like it was a pretty dull gig. It wasn't, because of two important details: Deckard has a genuinely wonderful voice-the recordings on her web site really didn't do her justice-and she knows how to use it.
Gordon Southern is always reliable as a furriner gone native enough that he can make additions to his act with local slang rather than just translations. Predictably, a show called "A Brief History of History" ran overtime. Apparently he had a lot of material... Hopelessly Eurocentric, but you've got to cut something out. And given the quality of his German and Spanish accents, I'd hate to see what he'd have done with the rest of the world's.
Adelaide's Best Break-Up Revenge had a great writeup in the programme, clever marketing, did what it said on the tin, and more importantly had a title beginning with A-it's both an injustice and a mystery why it wasn't sold out. The comedian, A.J. Rae, is local, I really want to see more from her.
Tessa Waters claimed to be doing a show about happiness. I was expecting platitudes and half-understood psychology readings. Instead she came on stage in a leotard with professional gold sequins in a pattern on the front, and decidedly unprofessional gold sequins spelling out the word ART on the back, at which point she could have spent her hour reading aloud from Chicken Soup from the Soul for all I cared: I was sold. Platitudes there in fact were, but there were more bizarrely enthusiastic late-80's dance moves. And not even the predictability to rickroll us.
Bob Slayer had posters up proclaiming his banishment from Perth and Adelaide with one last, free gig before he left, so naturally curiosity made me go even though a moment's thought would have told me the reasons were probably sordid and banal. And they were: it turned out he was kicked out of his Perth venue for drunken sexual harassment and his original Adelaide venue for drunkenly badmouthing his promoter in a blog post (memory may be failing me here). The gig itself was the kind of disjointed drunken ramble that can only end with either an apparently miraculous drawing-together of the threads in a brilliantly witty, unexpected, and perfectly-clocked climax (Diane Spencer, where are you when we need you?) or by fizzling out into an indefinite drone until the comedian runs out of time and/or audience. Slayer went for the second one. For all that, it wasn't a bad gig: he had a gift for working with the audience, a rubber face, and a quick wit when forced to improvise; but I'm grateful I didn't have to give the sod money to find that out.
Jon Brooks, by contrast, was too mediocre to even hold in contempt. He tossed the word "cunt" around loosely enough I was starting to get a modest head of hate going, but then he gave the game away by admitting he was trying to prove a (misguided) point about misogyny in Australia. (Really, I should have picked it from the beginning when his inevitable Rudd/Gillard jokes were all on Rudd. This was, incidentally, the sum total of his political material and probably the best stuff he had overall.)
After him, I decided to sod my wallet and the train home and walk into the first group late show going - they couldn't all be rubbish, could they?
No, but most of them sure as hell could. I'd name all the shit ones if I remembered, but that's effort they haven't earned, so: Moataz Hamde shone out as the main exception-I'd seen him several times before at local gigs, and it'd be really heartening the way he's visibly improved at every one, but for the fact that every other comic I saw tonight was older, more experienced, and rubbish. So, yeah, talent matters. Chris Knight was also an honourable exception, to the extent that he delivered dull material reasonably well and I thought it'd be rude to just walk out on him; I pretended to have gotten an urgent message instead. (The mobile phone is such a wonderful invention.)
Oh, and I made my train, because it left late. So I can only conclude that the best performance of that night was TransAdelaide's (with Womad on top of the Fringe, you didn't want people stuck in town because their watches were five minutes slow.)
Pat Burtscher has the worst comedy-show title of the Fringe ("Patapotamoose"? Really?) but, well . . . Jon Brooks had plenty of material (not necessarily good material, but material nonetheless), but too little talent to get much out of it; Burtscher, on the other hand, had very little material, and certainly none prepared in advance, but talent to fucking burn, with a serious gift for a good non sequitur, which he alternated with stretching jokes past the point they were no longer funny to the point mere duration and bravado make them hilarious.
Ross Daniels had a hypocritically slick show about growing up punk in Brisbane under that prick Joh's iron gumboot. Apart from neatly demonstrating the general difference between a one-man play and a stand-up show, he did a fine turn flipping between playing himself, his own grandparents, Molly Meldrum and a couple of distinctly porcine cops. Could have done without the dream sequence at the end, though.
Danielle Deckard's America. (The punctuation is part of the title, and Deckard's the kind of singer/songwriter where you can be pretty sure she put serious thought into that full stop...) I had higher expectations of this show than was perhaps reasonable, but really, is it so much to ask to reach deeper with choices of cover songs than just sorting one's iTunes library by title and cross-referencing with the atlas? Apart from when she broke with the theme and sang her own material, the only remotely surprising thing we heard was some Ryan Adams. (Though I hadn't realised that the DKs had had their work cut out for them trying to make 'Viva Las Vegas' more cynical than it was already.) Her band was competent but, except on 'Streets of Philadelphia', almost entirely superfluous.
All this makes it sound like it was a pretty dull gig. It wasn't, because of two important details: Deckard has a genuinely wonderful voice-the recordings on her web site really didn't do her justice-and she knows how to use it.