Thursday 24 March 2016

Josh Glass in the Ultimate Triumph of Loneliness, Polit Bar, Manuka

Doing a standup show about a recent breakup is the kinda thing that is fraught with peril. The emotions are surely too raw, the comic perspective difficult to attain, and the risk of simply being a whiny-twit-who-can't-understand-why-it-all-ended-while-at-the-same-time-demonstrating-exactly-why-it-ended-by-whining is pretty damn great.

Luckily, Josh Glass falls down none of these rabbit holes. Possibly because, for all that this show is about a recent relationship that ended in breakup, there's not a lot of bitterness here. There's ruefulness, sure, and a little bit of "wasn't I stupid", but it never feels like revenge is the motive here. Glass instead turns inwards and finds the common romantic stuipdities that people fall into, and celebrates and mocks his own naivety and errors with charm.

This isn't a completely polished hours - there's a couple of jokes that don't quite land, and the ending is more a "and I'm done" rather than a "this caps this perfectly", but it is a skilfully presented hour of comedy from one of Canberra comedy's risking stars.

In support, Riley Bell was a solid MC, with strong skills in acting out his various tales of modern debauchery, while Peter Szmowski had a few good gags but a bad tendency to say his setups twice ("People are ridiculous, they're ridiculous") that could stand to be cut (admittedly, he's a polish performer doing a set in English, and any set I did in Polish would be way worse, but still... he could lose the re-statements)

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