Comedy: Paul Foot (★★★★)

Perth Comedy Festival
May 5, 2023

I really should stop reviewing Paul Foot’s stand up comedy.
Not stop seeing him, mind, because he’s one of the funniest people on the planet, but because writing about his act is a little like telling your partner how much you love them. Again.
The first time I saw Foot, back at the first version of the Perth Comedy Festival in 2012, I was literally helpless with laughter. Friends watching me watching him were genuinely concerned something might burst.
The sad, inevitable truth about seeing him every chance you get since is that the wonderful disorder he creates in you wears off, especially when you see newcomers in the audience behaving like a dog kicking its hind leg as its tummy is scratched as Foot’s carefully crafted madness overwhelms them.
Despite his on-stage paroxysms, his violent bobbing and bizarre, leaping walks that physically punctuate his material, there’s something charming about a comedian who welcomes the audience “Greetings!” and performs it without obscenity (one indecency, another word for fellatio slipped in late in his monologue, may have been the only lewdity I can recall in all the times I’ve seen him).
But his subject matter, from the priapic and environmental impact of powdered rhino horn to demented ad copy for SpecSavers and the Swiss assisted dying clinics Pegasos, from the virtue of the word “charlatan” to the critical importance of the year 1903 to our perception of everything from wars to serial killers, all delivered in (what he claims are) “extended and ill-advised ad-libs”.
It’s all hilarious, erudite and culturally literate, and deeply, deeply funny (too deep, possibly, for the stony-faced cohort in every Paul Foot audience who are clearly wondering what on earth they’ve wandered in to).
What it is is a disturbance of the comedy spheres as ambitious as very few comics – Spike Milligan is the only one who comes immediately to mind – have attempted. And, fear not, even if you do see him as often as I have, familiarity will only breed respect.
Here's a taste…

Perth Comedy Festival

Gen Fricker (★★★)
Perth Comedy Festival
Mt Lawley Bowls Club
May 13, 2016
Gen Fricker is solidly in the “a funny thing happened to me” mold – in her case including an inconvenient attack of a virulent strain of acne, a wisdom tooth extraction gone haywire, meeting the new boyfriend’s misogynist former schoolmates and starting work in the graveyard shift at Triple J in the shadow of the Sydney Seige.
She finds out that turning 26 already pushes you out of all sorts of demographics – including her own station’s target audience – and the lifestyle of “disgusting” 19-year-olds.
There’s the underlying story of her part-Maori ethnicity (she’s a self-described “Cinnamon Swirl”, half white, half “Mouldy”) and a sense of youthful cynicism giving way in to experience and self-awareness throughout.
If that process comes at the expense of some cheap laughs, it makes her a more interesting person in return. 
 
Sarah Callaghan (★★★½)
Perth Comedy Festival
Mt Lawley Bowls Club
May 13, 2016 
Sarah Callaghan is quite something, but not quite the something she seems. She may have been born and raised in Uxbridge, in her eyes at least a cripplingly disaspirational West London satellite town where “dreams disintegrate into pieces of shit”. She may even actually live in a dingy 5 x 3m room with a broken curtain rail in her mum’s house under the Heathrow flightpath.
But there’s nothing dingy about her comedy – it’s as carefully polished as the shoes that are her pride and joy (she’s got a great but unrepeatable Imelda Marcos gag with the punchline “head over heels”), and her life story doesn’t mention her stint at Chicago’s Second City School (think Alan Arkin, Bill Murray, Tina Fey, Steve Carell, just for starters).
So her Anglo-bogan, passive/aggressive character may be just that, but it’s finely-honed and convincing, and, like our own Steve Hughes and Jim Jefferies, a great platform to make her point as well as her jokes. 

Read complete reviews of Fricker and Callaghan in The West Australian

Andrew Maxwell (★★★ ½

Perth Comedy Festival
Perth Town Hall
May 5, 2016 
Andrew Maxwell cracks on about Aussie backpackers in his Perth Comedy Festival show, Yo Contraire. They pop up everywhere, he says, even, during The Troubles, happily working in Belfast pubs that no sane person would have gone near.
Well, if there's anything as ubiquitous as our compatriots abroad, it must be Irish comedians.
This festival we've already had David O'Doherty and Tommy Tiernan, with Jimeoin still to come, and there are dozens more doing the rounds of international comedy.
There’s clearly a comic efficiency dividend if you don’t have to establish that you’re funny – because you’re Irish, and you just… are. 


Read the complete review in The West Australian  



Speedmouse (★★★★)
Written and performed by The Umbilical Brothers

David Collins and Shane Dundas

Regal Theatre

April 30 and May 1.


It risks being patronising to say that an act that’s played with great success around the world for a quarter of a century is getting better, but the Australian comedians Dave Collins and Shane Dundas, the Umbilical Brothers, sure look to be doing it with a scintillating revival of their venerable show, Speedmouse.
Collins and Dundas rattle out a faultless parade of their goodies; fast-forwarding, pausing and rewinding, instantly transforming themselves into Velociraptors or diving underwater, channelling Yoda and Superman or showing us dozens of new and hilarious ways to give someone the finger.
It’s great to see performers who know exactly what they are doing and don’t try to pretend otherwise. If you’re tired of comedians who make out they’ve landed on a stage in front of you by accident with nothing prepared for your entertainment, the unashamedly unaccidental Umbilicals are just the act for you.


Read the complete review in The West Australian  

 
Paul Foot (★★★)

Regal Theatre
April 23, 2016
I’m not walking back my conviction that Paul Foot is as funny a comedian as walks the earth; one of those rare beasts who can have you helpless with laughter (there’s Spike Milligan in the firmament, Steve Martin and Billy Connolly among the superstars and Neil Hamburger on the festival circuit; our own Damien O’Doherty has it in her too).
So it’s a shame that Foot seems to be trapped in a blind alley. In his last foray here, with his Hovercraft Symphony in Gammon # Major, and even more this visit, his interest in the process of comedy, clever and insightful as it is, comes at the expense of what makes him so special, the parallel universe of the imagination he inhabits so hilariously.
We get the idea behind Fun with Penny, an excruciatingly unfunny cross-dressing character with a penchant for audience humping, but she is, well, excruciatingly unfunny. We get the deconstruction, as we get the artifice of his long self-introduction and the way it skewers stand-up convention, but it’s all punctuation and not near enough of some of the wildest words in comedy.
It’s all a bit disappointing (though I’d never miss a chance to see him again).
 


David O'Doherty (★★★★)
Regal Theatre

April 19, 2016


I dodged a bullet last night when I decided not to wear my prized salmon pink T-shirt to the Regal to catch David O'Doherty's We Are All of Us in the Gutter, but Some of Us are Looking at Him.
Quelle chance! There he was, in an all-but-identical T-shirt, a bit "doughy" (his words), a bit avuncular, a bit ramshackle.
He was just like me. If I'd have been in pink. And Irish. And funny.
Very funny, in truth. O'Doherty has a sly accidental charm and a suitcase full of yarns of the possibly true story variety (he's a regular guest on BBC One's Would I Lie To You, where he'd be a holy horror to pick).
If you judge a comedian by the amount of stuff he can cram into his hour (and a bit in this case), O'Doherty's your man. If you like that stuff to be funny and a little bit wise as well, then his fart smartphone app and the consequences of mixing some of those super food concoctions with phenomenal amounts of booze (at a party to celebrate the success of the Irish marriage equality referendum) will suit you down to a salmon-pink T.        

Comedy: Paul Foot (★★★★½)

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Comedy: Perth Comedy Festival Gala

Perth Comedy Festival Gala
Joel Creasey, Cam Knight, Tien Tran, Gen Fricker, Mike Goldstein, Paul Foot, Stephen K Amos, Craig Hill, Nick Cody, Rhys Nicholson, Angelo Tsarouchas and Tony Woods
Regal Theatre, Subiaco
Wednesday April 29

Crawl over broken glass to see this bloke (pic: Tobias Venus)

The Perth Comedy Festival has defied demographic gravity this year and moved west. It’s now spread everywhere from the UWA campus to the Mt Lawley Bowling Club, the only venue to survive from the festival’s previous iteration.
The great benefit of a Gala is that you generally get the best of each act’s full show. It’s interesting to see how fashions change in comedy, sometimes quite rapidly. There seemed, happily, to be less fixation with sex than a couple of years ago, and far more on various forms of bigotry; admittedly, with four gay men, an Asian Australian and African American comedians on the bill, that might be expected.
As always, Galas are the best of times and the worst of times; you love the variety, but miss the journey a fine comedian takes you on.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Comedy: Paul Foot

Perth International Comedy Festival

Mt Lawley Bowling Club

Until May 4

My first encounter with Paul Foot, at the Opening Gala of last year’s Perth International Comedy Festival, left me quite literally helpless with laughter. On that occasion, his magnificent, surreal diatribe about sinister vans, and glasses that can make them disappear, quite did me in.

He’s not for everyone. Sometimes his physical comedy is more convulsive than compulsive, once in a while his humour is so deep rooted that it’s hard to get at. There were some at his sold out show who sat stony-faced as he careered way over their heads.

But, and much more often, you’d suddenly hear defenceless, almost whimpering, laughter as this singular comedian got someone, like me, right between the eyes. 

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian       

Perth International Comedy Festival 2013

Wrap
This year's festival consolidated the runaway success of 2012, without adding anything particularly new to the mix (not that it matters overmuch). Once again it was gamely curated by Jo Marsh, and its management and marketing were outstanding. The festival could really use a 3/400 capacity room to fill the gap between the main hall at the Astor and its next biggest venue, at the Mt Lawley Bowling Club, but that might be a hard ask unless they can get their hands on, say, one of Artrage’s spiegeltents, or go further afield from the Beaufort and Walcott precinct,and that would be a great shame.

For me Paul Foot's extraordinary performance at the opening gala and the legendary Bob Downe's glorious Mother's Day show were the great highlights of the festival, and Lawrence Mooney, Jim Jefferies, Jimmy McGhie, Joel Creasey and the festival’s surprise packet, Josie Long, who took out the Best of the Fest award, were acts you’d go a long way to see. It’s great that we now don’t need to.

I've mentioned before the impressive roster of Asian/Australian performers at the festival, and should also recognise the roster of local acts that more than held their own with their imported colleagues. Congratulations to Sami Shah (who is in both categories), a well-deserved winner of the Best Local Act award.