★★★★1/2
Adelaide Fringe. Hell's Kitchen at Rhino Room. 17 Mar 2023
Reuben Solo is a rarity. His comedy has a unique style all of its own, and it’s not merely about telling jokes which would be lamentably formulaic. His own publicity describes his humour as “off-beat”, and it is certainly that: it is eccentric, unconventional (thank the lord!), and intelligent.
Reuben Solo’s curiously titled show Palindrome doesn’t rely on vulgarity and bad language, but it does turn sharp observation and oh-so-funny acidic comment on the seemingly ordinary things we do and the trite things we say in our daily lives, which, when unpacked, border on being meaningless. By way of illustration, Solo seizes on the debut single What Makes You Beautiful by British-Irish boy band One Direction. The song includes the lyric ‘You don't know you're beautiful, oh oh / That's what makes you beautiful’, and Solo examines this in hysterical detail. If she did know, Solo asks, then she wouldn’t be beautiful, and so she mustn’t be told, because if she is told then she’d know and she’d no longer …. you get the idea! This gag goes on and on for some time, and as it ludicrously and hilariously unfolds, and becomes more and more convoluted, the audience is falling about the place with tears rolling down their faces. Literally. And all the time, Solo has a dead pan look on his face, with an occasional wry smile.
Solo loves paradoxes, and his show is brimming with hilarious examples. He talks about skydiving, and the nature of the backup safety parachute. He quips with a playful glint in his hypnotic eyes that there isn’t a third parachute because it is assumed the backup parachute is failsafe. So why isn’t it the primary one, Solo asks? Again, Solo harvests this gag for all its worth, and although it seems we are falling down a bottomless rabbit hole like Alice, it truly doesn’t get tiresome, and it seems our well of laughter is also endless.
Audience interaction is one of the basics of a classy comedian’s bag of tools, but Solo does it differently. He gives a very funny Ahn Do brush with fame demonstration, but his guest is someone from the audience. Solo asks the guest questions, listens very carefully to the answers and steers the conversation in surprising ways. His guest is all the time surprisingly comfortable and unwittingly gives up personal titbits that Solo uses to advantage. The final result is side splittingly funny. In another routine, Solo ‘sabotages’ the microphone that his guest used, and the repartee takes on a very distinctive and hilarious direction.
So, why Palindrome? This reviewer surmises that Reuben Solo delights in dissecting what people say and do, and then putting it all back togetheragain in order to expose its essence. But as he reassembles it, unlike a palindrome, the process is not perfectly reversible, and this is one of the kernels of his comedy.
Reuben Solo comes across as self-deprecating and humble, or is he? What if he was? Whatever...… his material is excellent, and his (next) show is not to be missed!
Kym Clayton
When: 17 to 18 Mar
Where: Rhino Room
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
