Review by Steve Bennett

Steele Saunders’ first proper laugh comes a) by comparing his appearance to a celebrity and b) courtesy of someone else, the reviewer who called him ‘a chubby Ethan Hawke’. It’s a comment that Google reveals was originally made five years ago.

If his material’s not evolving much, this show – even taken in isolation – isn’t really going places either. It’s a hour that’s resolutely ‘kinda OK’; the occasional nice line or decent thought bobbing in an ocean of mediocrity.

Saunders is a fairly self-absorbed comedian. So who of them aren’t aren’t? But talking about how much it sucks to have to put up his posters, about his travails with getting a venue or about girls have it easy in comedy (possibly tongue-in-cheek, it’s too mild a joke to tell) are not made funny enough to go beyond petulant whines about a job he’s chosen to do.

The preoccupation also extends to his audience banter, forever seeking reassurance that he’s doing well, commenting on his own material, or asking for marks out of ten for the show so far. Let me think... how do you express ‘meh’ as a percentage?

For it’s hard to get excited about many of his routines about his hometown being a bit rubbish, about self-service checkouts, or the sort of smart-arse comments he’d said, or wish he’d said, to hairdressers of checkout assistants.

He does a decent job in upselling some of these sections: his showstopper routine, for example, might be simply about a drunken gig-goer mistaking a mirror for another room, and the aggressive confusion that follows, but he delivers it so well as to get a good crop of laughs, even if it fizzles to nothing. Equally he makes gags about budget airlines, a shop chain called 9/11 and the weirdo he met in the street that hit the spot, and a routine about an ill-informed teenager trying to lie about having had sex is a stand-out.

But there’s too little attitude on display. Saunders doesn’t really have an angle or strong worldview to buy into, just a few superficial comments that fall into the ‘quite funny’ category. That’s never going to be enough to make him anyone’s favourite live comedian, away from his successful I Love GreeN Guide Letters podcast.

It’s a fair bet to say his former venue didn’t get demolished because he tore the Roof off it.

Review date: 7 Apr 2013
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival