Review by Steve Bennett

Chopper is your walking, talking, law-breaking Australian stereotype. A no-nonsense man’s man (and part-time sadistically violent criminal), he has no truck with such effete metrosexual indulgences as personal grooming, frothy coffees and self-absorbed psychoanalysis. His current tour is called Harden The Fuck Up Australia, just to counter any ambiguity over his agenda, which is to prevent his homeland turning into a nation of bleating whingers.

He’s supposed to be a direct depiction of hardman Australian criminal Chopper Read, but in this guise, he's more like the antipodean version of Al Murray’s Pub Landlord, albeit one with psychopathic tendencies and a lengthy criminal record – an unreconstructed geezer who sees the world only in black and white. His way is the only way even if, like his droopy moustache and tinted glasses, it is firmly stuck in the Seventies.

The creation of Heath Franklin, he is clearly hugely popular, judging from the whoops of approval that greet his opening: ‘How the fuck are you?’; a sentence that’s rare for Chopper, being a mere 20 per cent swearing. What the father who brought his 11 and 12-year-old sons along to this tirade of filth was thinking, God only knows.

It’s easy to see the appeal. Chopper’s a well-defined caricature with a lively line in menacingly funny patter. He quick-wittedly banters with a feisty audience and his relentless intolerance yields some great gags. Anyone who can come up with the punchline: ‘Try a Big Mac – it’s like having your face raped by aliens’ certainly has a way with language, even if it’s a peculiarly blunt one.

Some of his gimmicky set pieces are less welcome, especially a deliberately amateurish slideshow in which he goes through the nations of the world and mocks their men for wearing dresses, at least in national dress. The Scots, the Greeks, the Fijians and more are all the targets for cheap laughs as he superimposes speech bubbles questioning their sexuality, with an average of four exclamation marks at the end of each weak, homophobic line.

It’s repetitive and lazy – and the truth is, he doesn’t need to resort to such low blows, as Chopper is much funnier, often blisteringly so, when left to his own devices. He’s a class act, and I’m not just saying that because he’ll cut me if I don’t…

Review by: Steve Bennett
Adelaide, March 2007

Review date: 28 Mar 2007
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett