Melbourne International Comedy Festival review by Steve Bennett

James McCann frequently gripes that he’s losing a fortune on his festival show. But then if he asked himself why anyone would seriously pay $20 to see this rubbish – even in Monopoly money – it might give him a different perspective.

For nowhere in this garbled, under-prepared and ill thought-through offering is there anything to give you confidence that this is a man who has the first clue about what he is doing.

The premise is that he’s a nun and a Monopoly champion; the sort of odd combination that might be suggested in the course of an improv night. But even the most average troupe would have created on the fly something that contained more coherence, and more jokes, than this allegedly pre-prepared stream of mirthless nonsense.

Dressed as a nun, with bright scarlet lipstick, and occasionally playing the accordion, McCann spews a ‘surreal’ story of being bought up in Central American poverty until discovery of a 1978 Kiss edition of the best-selling board game put him on course to the championship circuit, where his nemesis was an evil bitch in a solid gold dress and... no, it’s really not worth trying to explain any more.

There’s absurdity, then there’s just shoving random things together in something resembling a story and hoping the weirdness counts as wit. Nunopoly is very much in the latter camp.

At just 35 minutes, this slapdash show blissfully short, but seems longer, as once the comic impact of a nun with a beard wears off, after about ten seconds, there is little worth sticking around for. If only this sister had taken a vow of silence.

Review date: 6 Apr 2014
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett