The list of best newcomer winners at the Melbourne comedy festival doesn’t exactly heave with famous names – not to people in the northern hemisphere, at least. But there are a few, including Flight of the Conchords and Daily Show correspondent Ronnie Chieng. Will the names Angus Gordon and Aaron Chen one day trip as easily from the tongue? On the basis of this double-billed UK debut, you’d probably hedge your bets. Yet you can see what swayed the judges: Gordon and Chen are distinctive personalities, with ambitious new angles on the art of standup.
But they’re also both, to some degree, anti-comics: performers who scorn the conventions of standup and prompt the kind of nervous laugh generated by material more painful or inept than outright funny. Anti-comedy has a distinguished lineage, from Andy Kaufman via Gregg Turkington’s dyspeptic alter ego Neil Hamburger to the monotonous Brit Edward Aczel. That’s the ballpark we’re in this evening: discomfort in place of mirth. As Gordon says at the top of his set (looping in Chen’s sidekick Jon Lo): “We’re just three variations on Australian awkwardness.” Which, after an hour and 40 minutes, doesn’t seem like much variation at all.
You can, it turns out, get too much of a bad thing – and well before the end of these twinned sets, I craved a quickening of pace or some relief from all the tense, if artful, silences. Lo is up first in the double-and-a-bit bill, with a short prologue to Chen’s 40-minute set. There’s a drawn-out joke about Tinder; he shows us his tattoo. The joke in both his and Chen’s case is the lackadaisical delivery – slightly perkier with Chen but still slacker-slow, with every scripted line separated by uncomfortable pauses and “unbearable” (his word) audience interplay. Chen will solicit the audience’s opinion interminably on the same hot snack, a tedious process rendered all the odder by the fact that none of us know what snack he’s talking about.
He carries it off unflappably and with no little charm – his company is always enjoyable, even if the paucity of material and harping on the gig’s supposed failure get frustrating (it has, he admits, been “mostly just tepid”). Faltering anecdotes about eating chips off the floor of his car and inventing a Japanese girlfriend to annoy his dad suggest a young man with minimal life experience to draw on. But he knows that. His unearned self-satisfaction is part of the gag.
Through it all, Lo sits at a desk upstage, infrequently operating sound cues and serving as Chen’s nerdy co-conspirator in whatever trick they’re playing on the audience. By the close of their set, the evening needs an injection of energy. But we get the opposite in Gordon: a downbeat depressive from Brisbane – whey-faced, red-eyed, morbid.
It starts with a video of Gordon’s expressionless face – all very Kim Noble – and the Smiths on playback. The show is called Sad Boy Comedy Hour, and finds our host bleakly observing the murderous habits of cats or pontificating on euthanasia. It’s played as – and may indeed be – real. This isn’t some broad caricature. Gordon seems to feel a vague disgust for glib comedy, although he doesn’t disguise the occasional (and welcome) flicker of a smile at his more obvious laugh-lines.
Elements of the set are enervating. Gordon bashes his forehead with the mic to imitate a cane toad’s death throes, and decants a jug of water to explain Brisbane’s recent floods. Others – twisted dialogues culled from his loveless relationship, jaundiced critiques of celebrity philanthropy – strike the sweet spot where poetic nihilism meets gallows humour. I liked the picture he painted of his gran’s head grafted on to his shoulder, which summoned the spirit of another anti-comic, the Edinburgh comedy award nominee Jordan Brookes, and his spoof dead-gran show Body of Work.
He’s not there yet, though. Neither of these two prize-winners is the finished article – but both are promising in intriguing ways. What they aren’t is ideal bedfellows. To watch them together is to have frustration heaped on frustration, as each one withholds the release of tension that tends to characterise comedy. Individually, their acts are eye-catching. In a double-bill – one malfunctioning, the other wilfully joyless – they’re fatally low on dynamism.
- At Soho theatre, London, until 13 January. Box office: 020-7478 0100.
