Melbourne International Comedy Festival review by Steve Bennett

It takes a while to figure out the peculiar atmosphere at Fancy Boy Variety Show, where exaggerated, throaty guffaws greet every line, almost before it’s said. Then the penny drops. This is like a speech at an office party, where everyone roars at mere mention of Jen from HR, because we all know what she’s like, right? We know what’s coming.

But the office here, is comedy, and the jokes are about the clichés of stand-up. The late-night audience is dominated by comedians high on their own post-gig euphoria who laugh louder, earlier, and longer than seems natural – perhaps to demonstrate their status, to prove just how in on the in-jokes they are.

‘Do things annoy you, sir?’ our compere demands of one punter, mocking the artifice of crowd work. ‘Good. Then I can do the bit.’ Elsewhere he makes great play of ‘casually’ checking the notes written on his arm as he lays on the obviously insincere bonhomie with a trowel.

At the risk of being drummed out of the comedy coterie, this stance isn’t entirely original. Sometimes it can seem that every other open spot is doing comedy deconstructing comedy, in the mistaken assumption every one else is as immersed and fascinated by this world as they are.

That said, the Fancy Boys – in real life John Campbell, Greg Larsen, and Henry Stone –  do it expertly well, and once you’ve got beyond the initial cliqueiness, their ribald, knockabout menagerie of over-the-top variety turns is a silly, crude delight.

Their commitment to the stupidity is beyond reproach. After all, if you’re going to have a character called 'Mr Cum', you can’t do it half-cocked. Larsen, a stand-out even among all these larger-than-life performances – even brings a tragedy to another caricature, that of the lazy musical comedian, which would otherwise be left with only the central joke that song parodies are rubbish.

Similarly, spoof sketch troupe The Mix Nuts expertly capture the twee smugness of the worst drama-school graduates, while speciality acts like crap mindreaders find themselves in the firing line, too. It’s the energy and the stupidity with which these are executed that propels Fancy Boy into the cultosphere; the show all the comics are flocking too.

One of them gets a guest spot each night. Today Lawrence Mooney deploys the character of a Dutch stand-up to get away with potentially offensive lesbian material but with a disarmingly stilted accent. However this is not a show about the guests, but the core team who have clearly been egging each other on to create increasingly outlandish characters, flamboyantly trampling over the conventions of entertainment. As with most anarchic shows, results are not guaranteed, but the boisterous charm goes far.

Review date: 5 Apr 2014
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett