Steen Raskopoulos
Everyone thinks they’d make good comedians. Few are ever confident enough to try it. But Steen Raskopoulos is like that friend who not only believes you can do it, but pushes you on to the stage.
He begins his show Character Assassin acknowledging his, and an audience’s worst fear: crowd interaction. But he doesn’t excuse them, involving a full third of those present by the show’s end. If being pulled up on stage is your worst-case comedy festival scenario, your odds at Raskopoulos’ show aren’t good.
This isn’t the combative, sink-or-swim baptism of fire you might dread. When Raskopoulos shoulder-taps someone, he does so in such a supportive, friendly way that he seems to unlock their capacity for comedy (or at least the rest of his audience’s readiness to see the best in them). A sign language interpreter plucked from the crowd shows an off-the-wall flair for improvisation that had me wondering if he was a plant – but Raskopoulos is taken aback, too.
It’s genuinely heartening to see people who, 20 minutes previously, were shrinking in their seats to avoid catching his eye, get onboard with such enthusiasm. That’s not to say the hour passes by the seat of its pants. An apparently throwaway remark early on reveals itself to be a narrative arc in a delightful and unexpected way, and a couple of character bits playing on familiar tropes, take on a new cleverness when later contextualised.
The proportion of the show that does involve the audience means its success each night relies on our goodwill – I have heard, anecdotally, of Raskopolous’ shows falling flat when he doesn’t have the room behind him. But tonight, everyone is eating it up. Elle Hunt
• Steen Raskopoulos’ Character Assassin was at the Factory Theatre from 5-10 May
Gen Fricker
The Loft is a 40-seat space high in the eaves of Enmore Theatre, so close to the main venue that most of the laughs during Gen Fricker’s Monsterpu$$y were coming from the next room. Those that did come from her crowd suggested it was loaded with friends and fair enough; Sydney’s her hometown.
For the rest of us, the anecdotes fall flat. Bits either end with a punchline that doesn’t justify the build-up or take an obscure, unpleasant turn. That’s variously due to Fricker misjudging the appropriateness of her response to a situation (a recurring gag about the B-52’s song Rock Lobster would be stronger if not linked to an abortion, and she misses a moment to secure her audience’s goodwill early on with a story about her overegged response to a heckler) , or pushing for laughs in stories that resist them.
A promising riff on the pop psychology teachings of Slate.com promptly buckles under the weight of a true and horrible experience Fricker had last year. But only an experienced comedian would succeed in playing this material for laughs, and Fricker deserves some props for attempting it.
I didn’t enjoy Monsterpu$$y, but Fricker herself is a disarming mixture of girlish (at times she seems far younger than 25) and raucous. I liked her at once and wanted to love her show, if it weren’t for its odd, disjointed tone, not helped by the incongruous musical(-ish) interludes, nor by her forgetting a structural story then shoving it in at the end.
The unhappy reality is that there’s more resistance – subconscious and structural – to women depicting themselves in unflattering or unlikable lights, so Fricker’s got forces working against her. Unfortunately her material isn’t yet strong enough to overcome them. Not to suggest that she needs to present herself as a character to be palatable, but if Fricker fronted more fully as an antiheroine – the Hannah Horvarth to her Lena Dunham – her comedy might be easier for audiences to engage with. EH
• Gen Fricker’s Monsterpu$$y was at Enmore Theatre from 12-16 May
Corey White
Comedy with a message seems to have fallen out of favour at this year’s Sydney comedy festival, with many standups disclosing five minutes in that there’s no moral to be had in the hour to come. A fair few have gone back on that proclamation to hedge their bets on a half-hearted little one at the end (“I suppose, if there is a moral...”).
Corey White commits wholeheartedly to “comedy with a conscience”, spelling out the moral of his show, The Cane Toad Effect, as though he were giving a speech in high school (“My speech is about...”): it’s of good intentions gone awry, as with the introduction of the cane toad to Australia – hence the title. Clearly, White’s show has been thought through.
The winner of the Barry newcomer award at the Melbourne international comedy festival is an affable Aussie bloke who reads Plato, and this is his first stand-up show. It is wonderful. Some patchiness in his actual jokes – and there is some, more apparent when he diverts from his narrative thread – is made up for, time and again, by his story: one of prison visits, foster care, drug addiction, alcohol abuse and. to quote the blurb, “the way lives go wrong – and right”.
The Cane Toad Effect is only a few years shy of telling White’s life story, spanning his early home life to a couple of years ago. Another (perhaps more confronting, but no less honest) treatment would more closely resemble Precious, Candy, or any other film that’s left you feeling like your stomach has been hollowed out with a spoon. There are moments of this – ranging from solemn, silent discomfort to despair – in White’s show, too, but they don’t last long.
He expertly dispels the tension in a way that in no way dismisses the gravity of what he’s been through. It’s as though he implicitly gives you permission to laugh at some of the worst fates that can befall people – perhaps because no one has found more humour in them than he has.
White finds catharsis, pathos and – it seems hard to believe – comedy in a narrative that would, told another way, ended a little earlier, be better held up as a reason to despair in humanity. As it is, The Cane Toad Effect is an exploration of tolerance, empathy and forgiveness that somehow manages to be funny, even irreverent. It’s a rare stand-up show that you emerge from feeling like a better person, and that you want other people to see so that they can be better people too. I can’t give any higher praise than that. EH
• Corey White’s The Cane Toad Effect was at Factory Theatre from 12-16 May, and will be at the Sydney Comedy Store on 5 June
Sam Campbell
A small, slender, innocuous-looking, class-clownish type, Sam Campbell – or at least Sam Campbell’s stage persona – is sort of reminiscent of James Franco in his push-and-pull, at once attractive and repellent manner, muttering, sniggering and smacking his lips like Beavis or Butt-head brought to life on stage. Your mileage will vary on the strength of that description – this isn’t so much stand-up as an extended, outsider-as-all-hell character study, with the point of difference the delivery.
Cambo’s On Top is a silly, weird “comedy party show” that asks you to put aside your good taste (in the refined, HBO-watching, New Yorker-reading sense of the phrase) and go with it wholeheartedly. Leave it to Campbell to ask the big questions, such as: “Why do we have necks?”, or “Why do hot people like Magnums?”
I’m also not sure whether axolotls are in and of themselves funny, or if it’s Campbell’s handling of them that makes me think so. Either way, Cambo’s On Top was the most bizarre show I saw in the Sydney comedy festival, but with it came some of the biggest laughs. EH
• Sam Campbell’s Cambo’s On Top was at Factory theatre from 12-16 May, and will be at the Sydney Comedy Store on 6 June
Neel Kolhatkar
When Neel Kolhatkar bowls onto the stage, casually dressed with a broad grin sweeping across his face, his charm settles the late night crowd who end up going a bit potty for him. His perfectly timed punchlines and over-the-top impressions are met with raucous laughter during an energetic hour in which he takes a pop at subjects ranging from the hapless Tony Abbott to apeish male sexual behaviour and the swagger of hip-hop records and DJs.
The 21-year-old has some 200,000 followers on YouTube and 63,000 on Instagram, so it’s no surprise his jokes on sex and inexperience play particularly well to this hip young crowd, delivered with a confidence you might expect from someone a decade older.
This is an engaging brand of self-effacing, plain-speaking Aussie humour: a ribbing of rivalry between Sydney’s universities; young women on the front row teased about their North Shore background. With his disarming charisma, Kolhatkar could do with some more pointed humour that doesn’t typically fall back on common Australian stereotypes. But he’s a promising young talent. Madhvi Pankhania
• Neel Kolhatkar’s Truth Be Told was at Factory theatre from 5-9 May
