On arrival to the umbrella revolution tent, the line of waiting parents and kids were greeted by a very energetic man (I think his name tag said “Frank”) who sought out two “attention seeking” children from the line for some later audience participation. He also asked for the “best smiler” in the audience, eventually approaching a very confused parent and giving them a great big hug. He seemed to me to be a natural children’s entertainer, and I thought I might be in for something better than the blurb in the festival guide had suggested.
Upon entering the tent, however, it became clear that Frank was not one of the performers, and we were to be entertained by a pair of much more awkward actors – A young man playing the lead as “Kung Fu Dupu” – a piece of excrement living in Melbourne’s sewers, and a young woman that played the other denizens of the sewers.
When writing children’s entertainment, a lot of people fall into the trap of targeting their comedy exclusively at children. This is a big mistake for two reasons – Children are a lot smarter than you give them credit for, and the audience for a children’s show is likely to be at about 50% parents. A lot of the start of this show was based on the idea that just using the words poo, bum and fart (with noises) is amusing in and of itself. While the 3 to 5 year olds in the audience got (a few) laughs from this, overall the audience didn’t take well to this. Parents of slightly older children were seen leaving throughout the first half of the show.
The humour targeted at older minds consisted almost entirely of horribly bad puns. A few managed to get some laughs (going to “urineversity” to do a “10,000 turd feces”), but mostly they just fell flat. I couldn’t help but imagine Matt Elsbury being subjected to this and bursting into some form of pun-induced homicidal rage.
I guess it’s not entirely fair to judge this just as a comedy show. The main purpose of the show was clearly that of edutainment, but it didn’t work on that level either. The Melbourne Water sponsored message of “It don’t go down the loo unless it’s been through you” was the somewhat irrelevant point of this show – and the audience was repeatedly bludgeoned with this point through inane rapping (note to edutainers—if you’re thinking of rapping about something, don’t). The main protagonist of the show was, confusingly, a giant cotton tip (though I thought it was a tapeworm when I first saw it). Once again, I don’t think children are responsible for the disposal of this “menace to our sewerage system” – If you give a 4 year old a cotton tip to play with, it’s more likely to end up embedded in their nostril or their ear drum than flushed down a toilet. I can’t help but think that they’re targeting the wrong audience here. I don’t know of too many kindergarten aged children that are prone to pouring waste-oils and paints down their drains. Melbourne Water’s message might have been better targeted with something for young adults, for whom the disposal of sanitary and household waste is actually starting to become relevant.
The writing of the show was all over the place. The links from scene to scene were weak, and nothing was really explained in any detail. After spending five minutes getting the audience to pump him up with chants telling him that he stinks and that’s what he’s meant to do (because he’s a poo), the cotton-tip character appears on stage and insults Dupu by telling him that he stinks – to which Dupu actually takes offence.
That all said, this is a free show, so if you’ve got nothing better to do, you’re the parent of very young children and you have a high tolerance for pun-based humour, I’m sure there are worse ways to spend part of your afternoon – but if you came expecting a some real comedy, you’re likely to be disappointed.