The very affable Yianni Agisilaou opened to a somewhat ‘cold’ room (half-full of wearied Tuesday punters, mostly sitting at the back) and never quite managed to warm the crowd up, which is unfortunate as you get the feeling that it could have been a very good gig if he’d been able to.
The initial premise, the titular 96 and one half things that @£$% me off (exactly what curse those symbols refer to, if any, is amusingly left open to the audience’s personal interpretation) gets off to a fairly pedestrian start as Yianni talks about those things that piss everyone off (babies on planes, women are like X and men are like Y and so forth) which have been pretty typical stand-up fare since the eighties. However as the show progresses Yianni’s complaints become more obscure and consequently more interesting, branching off into fields as diverse as Quantum mechanics and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (extra points to those audience members who get the ‘Schrödinger’s Twat’ joke).
About halfway through the show Yianni begins to talk about his father and this segment really is the highlight of the show. Yianni fully inhabits this character, a truth-talking, womanising, hard-case Greek fisherman who “couldn’t be more full of himself if he ate his own arms.” He’s a great creation, spouting off egotistical aphorisms with an easy charm that had the audience giggling, especially when talking about those elements we saw in people in our own lives (like those who see conversations as a contest to see who can get the most words in).
While the 96 and one half things are certainly not all mentioned, the title is explained by the end of the show, along with a slight twist to the tale. However in spite of all these good elements, the comedian himself being the strongest of them, for some reason it didn’t all come together on the night- the audience never got carried away with laughter and the denouement was a little stiff. With a bit more polish this has all the makings of a really solid hour, but it’s not quite there yet.
96 and one half things that @£$% me off has a limited festival run of Wednesday 31st, Thursday 1st, Sunday 4th and Sunday 11th at Tony Starr’s Kitten Club. For full booking details go to the Melbourne Comedy Festival website