With any kind of collected line-up of comedians, it’s going to be a mixed bag of results. You’ll love some of it and hate some of it; Bulmers Best of the Edinburgh Fest has this in spades.
The show opened with Jason Cook who rolled straight into the cultural gags which were different in a very funny way and followed this up with stories of his marriage and taking his own appearance to bits. There was great crowd interaction and a large room full of hysterical people. He started off well and had the crowd in his hand but, as his set progressed, he seemed to want to push the “shock” factor of his routine and see how much we could take. Not sure if this was how he planned it but you got the feeling that at some point during the heckling stories near the end of his first set, he lost us.
Next on stage was Elis James. Straight away, you could tell why he was a crowd favourite at the Edinburgh Festival. He had that almost laid back but nerdy style of banter and it wasn’t so much as one line jokes that made us laugh as opposed to how he told the underlying story and his acting this out which made him extremely funny. He was good with accents and made fun of his experiences here in Australia and back in Wales. Elis does have a strange stage presence but this adds to the comedy factor. He was certainly the highlight of this group of three.
Jason Cook came on again for his second interlude where he tried to shock us more. This left a bit of a bad taste to what was overall, a pretty hilarious routine but he was probably only trying to soften the blow of what was to come next…...
Enter Carey Marx with a Teddy Bear named Parsnip under his arm. Similar to America invading Iraq, this was completely a “Shock and Awe” campaign. When your opening gambit includes having sex with a snowman which was ultimately an Albino, I’m not really sure where you can go from there? He had his moments of laughter but it was more out of being disturbing than funny. The whole set was a collection of one liners thrown out there to both stun and amaze that someone can actually say this stuff in public. There didn’t appear to be a large amount of structure to the set with long pauses between “jokes” given for us to both recover and brace ourselves for the next onslaught. Parsnip the Bear was there to be cute so we could handle this abrasive comedy style but even it couldn’t escape the below belt style of Carey.
On the whole, this was a good show but you get the feeling that the styling of the three performers was too different to be in the one line-up. It’s kind of difficult to recommend this show as a whole and you can’t chose to watch sections of it. Yet in a way, people did. It was the first time in a long time that I have seen people from the crowd get up and leave the performance as they must have been pretty disturbed.
For full booking details go to the Melbourne Comedy Festival website