Adrienne Truscott’s Asking for It: A One-Lady Rape About Comedy Starring Her Pussy and Little Else

By Lisa Clark

You’ve might have heard about this award winning show; that it is controversial, provocative, brave, powerfully political and, yes, Adrienne does spend a lot of the show naked from the waist down, but you might not have heard that it is also warm, welcoming, silly and adorable. Adrienne’s southern disarming charm reminded me of Dolly Parton and she makes you feel at home from the get-go.

Adrienne is better known as one half of burlesque cabaret act The Wau Wau sisters who have been touring Australia with their show about finding themselves in mortal danger in Queensland but are sadly not doing that show for the Melbourne International comedy Festival. It is not surprising that there is a cabaret / burlesque aspect to this show; some clever strip tease, music videos being projected onto her naked torso and the odd bit of slapstick, but all have a deeper political context about peeling off layers, revealing agendas and laying bare the blind, appalling ridiculousness of misogyny.

At the heart of the show is a comedic deconstruction of the incident in 2012 where Daniel Tosh, in response to a woman’s heckle about a rape joke not being funny said about her “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by, like, five guys right now? Like right now?” and then many comedians (mostly male & some even highly respected ones) came out in Tosh’s defence, (mostly missing the point about what was offensive about it). You get the impression that this hour is a direct response to that incident and a clever, comedic form of revenge. Revenge for every woman who has been raped, threatened, intimidated, disempowered, shut down or put down. Proof for this is the fact that the stage is strewn with framed photos of many of the comedians involved, so she can point them out and hold them up to ridicule. Well, by getting involved they were asking for it – weren’t they?

The key to it all for me is at the very beginning of the show when Adrienne points out that only Jewish people can tell Jewish jokes and only African Americans can tell jokes about African Americans. The unspoken implication is that only rape victims can tell rape jokes and I think Adrienne might be subtly telling us something about herself and about the show.

Most of the music throughout, including the house music before and after are songs by men being misogynistic or intimidating sexually towards women. They are pretty toe-tapping, popular tunes. I was lucky to have my younger friend with me point out before the show that we were listening to the notorious song ‘Blurred Lines’ by Robin Thicke. It’s a way of reminding us how endemic and accepted misogyny is in society without needing to say it herself.

Adrienne covers a lot of pretty serious ground but it’s so well written and performed that it is hilarious and a heap of fun throughout. Needless to say Asking for It: A One-Lady Rape About Comedy Starring Her Pussy and Little Else! Is not a show for everyone. But it should be.

Asking for It is on at the Portland Hotel – Portland Room until April 20
http://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2014/season/shows/asking-for-it-a-one-lady-rape-about-comedy-starring-her-pussy-and-little-else-adrienne-truscott-s

Wil Anderson : Wiluminati

By Jayden Edwards

Wil Anderson’s been around comedy for a while. Almost 20 years in fact. He’s won countless awards, constantly sells out runs and he’s been beamed into millions of homes on the telly every week. “My shoes are older than you” he tells one of his younger fans just after taking to the stage. With so much experience and success, one wonders if he really needs this review to be written. I mean, if positive reviews get bums in seats, this may just help contribute to another sell out run, creating far too many bums for seats.

Never the less, he gave me reviewer tickets, so i’d best review it.

After a rockstar welcome and some quick audience banter, Wil starts the show with a brilliantly told tale of his first ever New York gig, a lifelong ambition. “I love telling this story” he proclaims, and leaves no doubt, telling it with truckloads of his trademark enthusiasm and confidence. He notes how he loves to show off at dinner parties with the story, adding a lot of “sugar”, and i’m sure we got more than a few spoonful as well; it’s just makes Wil’s comedy so much sweeter. The story has a great twist that i won’t give away, but it’s a genius stroke, and a testament to Wil’s finely tuned comic timing and the effort he puts into his structuring. With this tale, he has the audience transfixed and eating out of his hands.

His first yarn sets up themes of chance taking, life experience and growing older. They’re loose themes that leave room to move, and they tie up the show nicely towards the end with some help from some Eminem lyrics. He goes on to talk about moving to America, including a great rant about their racist “Outback” restaurants, some embarrassing issues with his “dodgy hips” and another great yarn about a gig in Alaska. There’s a little bit of political stuff too, which in the past is where Wil thrives with his hilarious point driven, angry rants, but in Wiluminati it takes a bit of a back seat, his storytelling the beneficiary.

I’m not sure if it’s the countless hours of experience on stage, or just his life experience and ‘adventure seeking’ that makes Wil’s storytelling so fixating. I suspect it’s a combination of the two. Whatever it is, it’s only getting better with age. Entertaining tales and big punchlines with a point, you can’t ask for anything else really. Wil As good as Aussie stand-up gets.

Wiluminati is on at The Comedy Theatre until April 20
http://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2014/season/shows/wiluminati-wil-anderson

Lana Schwarcz : Love Monster

By Colin Flaherty

Reading excerpts from her Big Book of Exes, Lana Schwarcz tells a number of disastrous stories from her love life. She is anxious about still being single at 40 and wonders what the main problem is. Could it be the Love Monster?

Each former lover was referred to by occupation only which gave anonymity and also provided fuel for some witty lines about why their relationship ended. Some non-starter beaus were covered in two extended tales; one about a Vietnamese trip, the other about signing up for a reality show. This allowed her to explore some amusing peripheral material that didn’t focus solely on her love life and give more variety to the script.

This was a very theatrical show – essentially a humorous monologue that stuck firmly to a script. Lighting fade outs to divide the “chapters” rounded the formal staging. She delivered her tales with a hint of nervous energy that fitted well with the theme of being a little needy for affection. The audience couldn’t help but warm to her, even after she gave us a sickeningly cutesy collective name.

It wasn’t just an hour of Lana bemoaning her lack of a partner, there was something special thrown into the mix. A renowned puppeteer, Schwarcz has created a stunning creature in the titular monster who made a number of appearances throughout. A physical manifestation of her relationship issues, the Monster distributes love blindly much to Lana’s annoyance. The scene with the monster using Lana’s phone and her woeful attempts at poetry were great fun to watch as she created anarchy. It was a wonderful respite from the theatrical stiffness with some audience interaction which was gentle but liable to intrude on your personal space.

With its poignant ending, Love Monster is a show that unabashedly tugs at your heartstrings. With such a warm and engaging performer it is certainly a fun way to wallow in loneliness.

Love Monster is on at the Imperial Hotel until April 19
http://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2014/season/shows/love-monster-lana-schwarcz

Xavier Toby : ‘Mining’ My Own Business

By Noel Kelso

Last year comedian Xavier Toby managed to get himself into quite a bit of debt. So much so that he decided to leave behind his career as a stand-up comic to take a position working for a mine where he could earn a lot of money in a very short space of time and get his finances out of the red.

His show – Mining My Own Business – is the resulting story and does for the mining industry what Kitchen Confidential did for the image of working in the restaurant industry, and the results are not necessarily flattering.

Arriving on stage in a truly hideous Hawaiian shirt, Toby begins his tale by telling the audience the reasons for his decision – the moment he realised just how much debt he was in, the uncomfortable discussion with his uncle when he tried to get a job and the tiny plane containing massive blokes which greeted him on his first day.

Despite his degree in Engineering, Toby is given a position working in admin and this immediately picks him out as an outsider amongst the other, supposedly more manly, mine workers. The Hawaiian shirt is explained within the first few minutes and leads into a running gag about Xavier’s nickname on site. No – that’s not complimentary either.

There follows fifty enlightening minutes of funny, shocking and brutally honest tales of life on a mining site, aided with illustrative photos projected on a screen. Toby explains to the audience how swearing gets used as a form of punctuation by the miners and how they have to hastily modify this in deference to the supposedly more delicate sensibilities of the few ladies on the site when talking to them. He questions the effectiveness of the unwieldy and tedious system of health and safety which it was his job to help administer and how most guys on the site had found ways to ignore or dismiss. His description of the long and involved process for testing a manhole cover is gripping and ultimately baffling.

The audience were kept laughing for a full 50 minutes as Toby related his tales of life on a mining site with the practised delivery and confidence of an experienced performer, even dealing with a particularly rude member of the audience who had decided to make a phone call halfway through.

This is a witty, insightful and intelligent show offering a window into the inner workings of an industry which is usually kept behind closed doors.

‘Mining’ My Own Business is on at the Portland Hotel – Portland Room until April 20
http://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2014/season/shows/mining-my-own-business-xavier-toby

I love Green Guide Letters with Steele Saunders

By Lisa Clark

Let’s start with The Green Guide. It’s a weekly newspaper magazine about television, radio and technology and astronomy (for some inexplicable but delightful reason) but mostly about television in Melbourne’s The Age newspaper. The Letters to The Green Guide are from the public about television and radio, but mostly about television and mostly about ABC public television. I Love Green Guide Letters is a weekly podcast by Melbourne comedian Steele Saunders about the Green Guide Letters, which he loves, despite not watching many of the actual television shows that the letters are about. Steele usually has two comedian or celebrity guests on to discuss the letters with him and everyone has a lot of fun. The podcast has become very popular, even outside of Melbourne where they have no access to the Green Guide and this has a lot to do with the work Steele has put in to make it so much fun to listen to.

Steele has built a culture around the podcast of running gags about the Green Guide Letters and he has rules that his guests and listeners must obey; 1. Listeners will not send letters into the Green Guide just to have them read out on the podcast. 2. Steele will read the letters out in a high pitched, silly voice and 3. There is no talking allowed by guests during the reading of the letters. It helps add structure to what might otherwise be an excuse for comedians to get together and have a laugh and makes it feel like a special club.

This is the fourth time I’ve been to a live recording of I Love Green Guide Letters and they are always great fun, probably because everyone loves talking about television. The comedians not only have their own favourite shows to talk about but many have been on TV with their own fascinating behind the scenes experiences to share. They come on the podcast knowing that Steele is going to find some letters to read out about them or the shows they have been on. This can occasionally make for uncomfortable listening from some of the guests but he generally tries to find something nice as well as the usual negative letter. The guests for the first recorded episode of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival were Tom Gleeson, Pete Hellier and Dave Thornton and they worked well together.

If you are a fan of Steele’s podcast, then being in the audience at least once is a must, if only for the visual gags, like Pete’s framed gift for Steele apologising for his character being accidentally cut from the credit list at the end of the episode of It’s a Date that he was in and Pete and Tom’s stage whispering to each other in a huddle about Steele & Dave going on too much about the fun time they had together at the Meredith Music Festival. If you’ve never heard the podcast before this is a great chance to join in the fun and find out what it’s all about.

I love Green Guide Letters is on at the Swanston Hotel (note the venue change!) until April 19
http://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2014/season/shows/i-love-green-guide-letters-with-steele-saunders

Listen to I Love Green Guide Letters on iTunes or the website http://ilovegreenguideletters.com/

Aardvark Mark: After Dark

By Colin Flaherty

Jono Cowan, Oliver Morris & Tom Bainbridge. Three young guys who have joined forces to present a sketch show with a twist; sketches without borders. This blurring of the boundaries between one scene and the next was interesting and saved us from staring at an empty stage, but didn’t really serve the show in a comedic sense.

The vast majority of the sketches lacked a punchline. Before anyone brings up the “Monty Python didn’t do punchlines” argument, I will counter with the fact that these guys certainly don’t have the writing chops to get away with that kind of subversion. Any laughs came from them dicking about and mugging rather than any clearly structured jokes. Their modus operandi was to drive variations of an idea into the ground but this often had diminishing returns when the sketches overstayed their welcome.

In the handful of sketches that did have clear punchlines, they followed with some waffling banter, usually as a means of linking to the next sketch. This led to quiet spots where the belly laughs would have normally been; good if you’re a performer concerned with setting up the next scene but bad if you’re an audience member familiar with the standard structure of a sketch show and wants to get into a rhythm of mirth.

Their material included a fair bit of pop culture and to fully appreciate most of it required that you watched the same TV shows as they did. Their over the top caricatures covered for some of this shortfall but if you weren’t familiar with the show they were referencing, you were often lost.

A highlight was a big dance sequence that was both joyful and utterly silly. It would have been the perfect conclusion to the show but they followed it with a musical number that did nothing more than show off their musical talents and get a sing-along happening.

Some banter between the three critiquing their own performances, scripting and roles in the show were the some of the more interesting parts of the show. The scenes justifying the shows’ title were a clever idea but, despite a fun journey over the course of the show, lacked a strong payoff.

All three sold the shit out of the material with enthusiastic performances and lots of colour and movement. It’s a shame that the script didn’t live up to their sizzle.

After Dark is on at The Last Jar until April 4
http://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2014/season/shows/aardvark-mark-after-dark