COMEDY is a funny thing. No lame pun intended. I am just saying that five Comedy Festival Roadshow comedians can stand on the stage on their own with no musical instruments, no dancing or singing talent, few props, and their storytelling art and sense of fun.
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Actually, that’s not strictly true. Comedians Adam Hess, Damien Power, Danielle Walker, Matt Stewart and MC Dave Callan had a turn with the Mount Isa Civic Centre crowd. Callan did have his Beyonce dance moves and Walker showed us drawings. Stewart also had a notepad to read us his list of regrets. Having heard that Mount Isa is the place of Hollywood heavyweights (ha ha, yeah right), he also used the notepad to share his pitches for Australian superhero movies. They were all terrible ideas.
In an interview before the show, Callan said he welcomed heckles. I wondered if he was asking for trouble saying this. Yet Callan is a veteran. As an MC he actually had little stage time, in terms of sharing material, and he had everything under control with no strain whatsoever. Perhaps his biggest test was when the microphone stopped working. This could have killed the atmosphere. Callan needed to keep the crowd amused either with no voice, or by shouting at the top of his lungs. He resorted to the power of dance while the sound was restored.
The first comedian Callan introduced, the sacrificial lamb, was Adam Hess. There was almost an ADHD quality which either was more pronounced or more noticeable through his set. His segue from his first series of bits about travelling from the UK to being on an awkward date was brilliant in that it in itself was a punchline.
There was much going on in terms of his topics, with bits that went on a tangent and then returned with little clarity. We were halfway through a joke when I realised that Hess had returned to talking about the awkward date. I had thought he was still talking about his teacher from primary school days.
Matt Stewart was next. I’ve seen similiar styles before; the dry, slow, and almost melancholic delivery. But Stewart was never depressing, and if he was self-derogatory, then it was subtle. He took the expected styles that comedians employed and brought it to light, making it obvious what he was supposed to be doing. If he was using a faster, more manic delivery it is unlikely he would have gotten away with it.
Where he might have gone wrong is making a joke about getting stuck in traffic on his way to the gig. The crowd laughed. That’s where he could have left it hanging, ditched the rest of the bit, by treating it as sarcasm. He conceded it worked better for city based audiences but then continued as it was. The authenticity, the illusion of speaking directly to his specific audience instead of repeating memorised lines, was lost.
Danielle Walker won me over and I suspect she may have been the crowd favourite. Perhaps it was because she started with such a joke that was as dark as you wanted it to be, or because she was a Townsville girl. I swear that Walker has made the funniest joke about Townsville I have heard yet.
I loved her drawings that involved the Loch Ness Monster, and what she understood the monster to really look like according to a documentary. The realistic monster was ‘boring’ so she set out to design it to look more exciting, all for the sake of supporting a tourist trap of course.
Power was the last of the night. Callan had described him as the more traditional comedian of the show. I do not know whether it is a Brisbane style of comedy but I have seen a similiar technique with others I know he worked with in that circuit. And this is to talk about really heavy subject matter, about life and our inadequacies as people, and somehow spin it for entertainment purposes. He was a slow burner, in a way, for a crowd that had adapted to absurdist and faster, manic delivery.
Power was experienced and calm, at least until the moment he looked at his arm to check what bits he would speak next. It was a sign that he either had changed the usual order of his material, or was trying out something new for the Mount Isa crowd. I felt the new bit worked and was a natural extension to old material that he would have had to have had for more than four years. It went down well with the crowd. He just sounded almost apologetic when he ended the material by saying it was a new bit.
Power was the up-and-coming comic in the Brisbane comedy rooms five years ago (and it can take 15 to 20 years in comedy to become a household name, if you’re lucky) and the time and experience has only made his material more mature, deeper and meaningful.