“Up-and-comers night” is generally a euphemism for “couldn’t get a headliner”. However, that wasn't the case here. For one thing, the very capable Joel Ozborn was topping the bill at FBi Social for this instalment of Laugh Your Tits Off (and look: love the venue venue, great idea, totally in favour of the whole thing, but LYTO is just about the worst name for a comedy night short of an active threat, so I assume it was a choice between that and ‘Cutting Up Your Pretty Face’).
Furthermore, most if not all of the comics are debuting their first full-length show at the Sydney Fringe next month so while they’re hardly household names, one would assume they at least know what they’re doing.
The amiable Mark Williamson was on MC duties and had a little difficulty getting the crowd going at first – the room wasn’t packed, but there was a decent number of folks filling out the pews. Marty Bright had the unenviable job of kicking the night off and seemed to succumb to nerves a little, but Seizure Kaiser got the first real belly laughs of the night with some unexpectedly sharp material – and even turned the potential disaster of forgetting part of his closing gag into a solid bit in its own right.
Rhys Jones is hit and miss, in the best possible way: from what I’ve seen of him in the past, he never concentrates on prepared material when he thinks there might be a joke in the moment, which sometimes falls on its arse and sometimes succeeds spectacularly – and this set was more hit than miss.
Vanessa Ballard was the first real revelation, though. Her first minute was identical to a hundred open mic comics – weight, clothes, the stuff that male comics derisively mock female comics for covering – and then drifted smoothly into some gloriously savage material at odds with her deliberately mumsy persona. Her timing was impeccable as she kept returning to her stepson’s academic record (“Two unit English, two unit World of Warcraft, two unit Fuck All”), qualifying each dig just long enough to slip the knife in further.
The other two highlights followed. Newcastle’s Matty B played up to the stoner stereotype with a brilliantly rambling set (including the single best hip-hop battle strategy I have ever heard), changing gears midway through to tell a long, absurdist story that had the crowd guffawing throughout to close the first half. Cameron James (pictured above) is probably the most obviously Next Big Thing of the lot of them: great hair, great presence, and a routine about his deep, heterosexual passion for Ryan Gosling that got the biggest laughs of the night. Give him another six months and he's going to be a serious contender for mainstream success.
He was a hard act to follow, but Irishman Dave Keeshan made a decent fist of it with solid material delivered in his lilting brogue (especially his beautifully simple mynah bird gag that should be on t-shirts at refugee rights rallies), before Ozborn took the stage.
It’s always refreshing to see a comic relax and try a few things out, especially when their bread and butter routine tends to be the standard pub-comedy-friendly young male comic chicks-booze-drugs-chicks shtick. I’ve seen Ozborn do exactly that half a dozen times, and always kill, but he's generally left me a bit cold. Tonight, however, he let loose; starting strong then doing a piece on the fly that required the audience to follow his train of thought for what could have been an uncomfortably long time without a gag. It’s not something I’ve seen him do before – generally he’s pretty punchy and crowd-pleasing – but tonight he read the audience precisely and they were on board right up to the meta-comedy of his closing rant. Ozborn, I underestimated you: there’s a darker, smarter comedian in there than I’d realised.
So: some wonderful new discoveries and a reassessment of a comic I thought I had the measure of. LYTO, you do good work. Now seriously, about the name…
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