"Saturday night is the worst," Sam Simmons tweeted after this performance, which was half standup, half running battle with the audience. Was this a one-off, or is Simmons this neurotically combative every night of the run? "You're looking at me like, 'Why are you doing this?'," he barks at his crowd, after another nugget of loud nonsense has met with an unsatisfactory response. Simmons was playing vexed, but it didn't feel like a failing gig – more like a gig whose supposed failure reinforced the Aussie comic's signature air of desperate futility.
This year's show finds Simmons binding the idiocy to a story, about a man summoning the courage to proposition his "bus crush". This in no way diminishes the arbitrariness of what this disturbing comic does. At one point, he's draping ham on his face and singing Desperado. ("If you're not laughing, you're fucking dead to me!") Elsewhere, he repeatedly interrupts his tale – dictated, to Simmons' frustration, by a voice from his radio – with ardent renditions of a 1980s Gillette ad jingle. But some of it is anchored to reality, including a terrific set-piece that sees Simmons phone a complaint line for advice on hailing a bus. His mastering of that skill is then dramatised, all knitted brows and euphoric music, as the cathartic finale to the cheesiest Hollywood sports movie.
The show's denouement, a furious rant about wanting to feel alive, too closely mirrors the climax of his award-nominated 2011 show. The shouting and swearing can get too much. Simmons is straining for an emotional pay-off, but there's no need. The emotion – and the absurdity – are already there, in the sight of man pouring his soul into lunatic activities, and discovering (or pretending to) that tonight's audience don't seem to be bothered either way.
