Steve Hughes

08-04 May ,

Sydney Comedy Festival

Critics' choice

The UK-based Australian comic returns

First published on 24 Nov 2011. Updated on 8 May 2012.

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In his lone performance at the Sydney Comedy Festival, a newly clean-shaven Steve Hughes played to an Enmore Theatre crowd, near-packed to the brim with metal-heads and plain old comedy fans alike.

Hughes rattled through every big issue he could: drugs, the Israel-Palestine conflict, political correctness, the ignorance of the American South in discussing their knowledge of space travel (“Most of them are probably like ‘Where’s space?’ which is ironically, quite a profound question").

The poster for this show simply read Steve Hughes Live, but during the performance was revealed to actually be titled Big Issues – quite apt, even when considering a good five minutes were spent analysing why hotels won’t let Steve open a window.

Hughes’s comedy is a gruff, intelligent diatribe on all the things society gets wrong, his audience often interpreting his aesthetic as heavy metal rock star fandom, frequently shouting out to him, though, props to Hughes, he embraces all of these in a positive, friendly manner.

While making some rock-solid points, one criticism that could be argued would be that Hughes offers blanket-solutions to problems purely as fodder for more applause. Who can blame him though? I’d love to be applauded half as much as he was during this show.

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Words by Reece Piper