Review by Steve Bennett

Aunty Donna is a scrappy, ramshackle sketch show full of dirty schoolboy jokes, stupid repetition and violently over-the-top performances.

Yet it’s also very funny.

At least most of the time.

Broden Kelly, Adrian Dean, Zach Duane and Mark Samuel Bonanno ride roughshod over any easy-to-level accusations of being unsophisticated with the sheer infectious verve of their performance. They own their idiocy and deliver it with a supercharged, gold-plated confidence that wins over most doubters – and positively scintillates those devotees they already have. A small handful of people in this appropriately late-night show were squealing with delight at almost every scene; a sign of a cult if ever there was one.

There is a narrative, of sorts. The quartet’s tour bus has broken down in the remote outpost of Spookyville, and on seeking help they discover that some blackguard has murdered the owner of the fax machine shop. They take it on themselves to investigate, thus allowing them to meet some of the town’s more colourful inhabitants. These include the hippy-drippy owners of an organic bookshop, a man with a propensity for inappropriately touching people, and the unsubtly named Heroin Man, who introduces himself to the audience via a vaudevillian song-and-dance number.

Not that this is a show about believable characterisation; the quartet simply ham their way thought performances designed to get to the next dick joke. And when they get there, they love to flog it to death. Sometimes to great effect (the obsession with Boost Juice is acoustically pleasing, while the ceaseless focus on semen is funny for its overblown self-indulgence) or sometimes not (the repeated punches to a lifeless victim in a fight scene just seem brutal, and the tap-dance interlude gains nothing from its length). It shows they tread a fine line between laboured, infantile humour and zany genius; and get it right maybe two times out of three.

It’s all in the execution, and in this their commitment cannot be faulted. From the opening lines of the power-packed rap number that opens the show, these four throw everything into selling their humour, from the base majority to the occasional finely-honed joke that reveals it’s not just four arrested-development mates dicking around. Though mainly that’s exactly what it is.

Review date: 5 Apr 2013
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival