Adelaide Fringe. Token Events. The Garden of Unearthly Delights. 11 Mar 2017
“Where are we now?
Where are we now?
The moment you know
You know, you know.” (Where Are We Now?, David Bowie, The Next Day)
Justin Hamilton and I are huge David Bowie fans. We were compatriots of the 90s Adelaide comedy scene, he as a rising star of the scene in this weird duo called The Bunta Boys, I as a full throttle critic of a few years old for dB Magazine.
Hamilton’s look back at the past is as comically engaging and as significant as Bowie’s own profoundly deep and introspective reminisce of his formative Berlin years.
Justin Hamilton: Bunta Boy is more than a crack-up Adelaide memoir. It’s a brilliantly structured history walk cum shining-light to this era’s young comedians, and for those who’ve followed his career, a reminder of how richly he has matured as an artist since then.
Hammo kicks off his tale with an old-man kidney stones story and accounts of his less than fabulous 2016 travails. The perfect segue into what we call, ‘in my day…’.
The 90s.
When Rundle Street was the only street in Adelaide and Boltz Bar was the home of new Adelaide comedy, run on a shoe string of sorts. It was the place where two poor, crazy guys, who made videos for friends instead of presents, discovered they could do that, and a whole lot more, to make people laugh.
That’s video cassettes kids. Not an iPhone video posted to YouTube. We didn’t have that gear.
With slick comic microphone noise technique, and a routine deeply imbued with memory, passion, self- awareness, irony and sheer joy, Hammo reaches out to audience members who weren't there in the 90s, and reminds them that the good stuff happens when you’re young and do crazy things. He was full of nutty ideas and our small city meant writing a new show - every week!
Great comedy is always low tech stand-up, backed by fierce insights and translated to reach the soul’s funny bone. It means making mistakes, overthinking, not thinking, but most importantly - as a friend said of this formative era we were deeply enmeshed in - it was not so much about the art, but ‘having a fu*king good time’.
Justin Hamilton does just that. Here he is now. Check it!
David O’Brien
When: 11 to 12 March
Where: The Garden of Unearthly Delights, The Factory
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
