Review by Steve Bennett

Harley Breen explains that his title is deliberately vague for the usual reason: when he had to submit it to the festival programme six months ago, he had no idea what the show would be about.

But even now, it’s not really ‘about’ anything; just a collection of anecdotes from his life, whether it be as a teenage pyromaniac accidentally torching his own roof, trying to clear up after blocking a friend’s toilet, or having to wear the scanties garments when going for a massage in Indonesia.

Calling this ‘just’ some tales is unfairly dismissive, though, for Breen is a thoroughly entertaining storyteller, with an enviable, seemingly effortless, skill of being able to keep his audience chuckling for the best part of an hour, with nothing cleverer than his own misadventures.

He comes across as the ordinary Aussie bloke; raised in small-town Queensland with an optimistic but often ill-advised ‘have a bash’ attitude to everything. He’s latterly tried to adopt a more hipster-style look, but it’s fair to say he hasn’t been accepted by that community. He’s got moobs for starters.

More significantly, he’s a father of a two-year-old, and while there are elements of ‘kids say the funniest/rudest things’ in here, as well as some self-analysis about how good or bad a dad he’s turning out to be, it’s played with a typical lightness of touch that he’s developed over seven previous solo festival shows.

He has no truck with anything artistic or pretentious, although he starts with a Baudelaire poem, it serves mainly to mock what sort of comic he never wants to be. Called Be Drunk, it’s a paean to throwing yourself headfirst into whatever passion you choose, but aside from serving as an introduction to his own youthful recklessness when he literally played with fire, it’s not a theme for the hour. Nothing – except his own embarrassment – is.

The upshot is not a groundbreaking hour, but the laughs are guaranteed thanks to Breen’s innate sense of humiliation, timing and good humour.

Review date: 15 Apr 2013
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival