Michael Hackett. The GC. 16 Feb 2018
Mystification.
This Fringe comedy show is touted as “groundbreaking”.
Um. What ground? Where?
Perhaps there is some poetic justice in the fact that this English comic’s main impression of Adelaide so far is that we have very smooth tarmac. It’s hard to break ground under tarmac. It is effectively ground sealing.
Michael Hackett seemed to love our tarmac almost as much as we didn’t love him.
He’s a stand-up from Manchester. He stands up tall at 6’ 7”. He supplied his enthusiastic audience at the GC with nips of vodka on arrival. They were very popular indeed.
Hackett worked and worked. He started out moderately well. He is extremely appealing. He has the cutest, most irresistible smile.
He had the old comedian's formula; he’d picked a couple of local references. Smooth tarmac on our roads and the Aussie argot of “strawbs” for strawberries. They were to be his best comedic assets.
There was no great revelation about “giantology” except that long legs are uncomfortable on planes.
But, for some reason, he read his audience as really classless turkeys who could not get their minds above their genitals.
So he hammered on and on about genitalia. His preoccupation with vaginas became tedious. One wanted to send him off to Hobart where he could gaze at them to his heart’s content on the MONA vagina walls. We learned about his scrotum.
One could go on. He did.
He effectively embarrassed and humiliated one sensitive young man in the front row. A few yobbos at the back guffawed before going out to get more drinks.
But, with other audience members streaming off to the loo never to return, he realised that his opening night world premiere in Adelaide was not going down. He had forgotten a chunk of his shtick, he said. He had jet-lag. The vodka was the thing his audience seemed to like best, he lamented. He does not think he’ll do that again. He cut his losses and ended the show early.
Relief.
Samela Harris
2 stars [one for the vodka]
When: 17 Feb to 17 Mar
Where: Variously between the GC at the German Club and The Bakehouse Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
