Melbourne International Comedy Festival review by Steve Bennett

Kyle Kinane has finished his run in Melbourne and headed back to the States. But at one point in this blistering hour of stand-up, the gruff, bearded American says that if he gets good reviews, he’ll return in 2015 to fill us in on some more stories. Let’s hope he’s true to his word, because he deserves very good reviews indeed.

In a landscape filled with relatively cosseted career comedians, he’s lived what he calls a ‘peppered existence’, which is to put it euphemistically. Some of the tales he tells have a decidedly dark undertow as he confesses to what a scumbag he can be, living on the edges of polite society. His near-nihilistic recklessness has its consequences, but however bashed up his often bleak experiences leave him, Kinane remains upbeat. ‘I’m still a happy person,’ he tells us, ‘though it takes some effort.’

His harshest anecdote involves a hugely inappropriate sexual encounter for which he would be rightly condemned. But no one is more judgmental about his behaviour than himself, and he takes our revulsion at the situation and plays along, pressing our buttons but also lacing the story with abject self-hatred. That he does so with such relatively upbeat insouciance is a difficult trick to pull off – but he does, and we laugh as the horror unfolds, watching metaphorically through our fingers.

Yet it’s not all vicarious tales of a shambolic life in extremis. He’s got a brilliant bit on opening pistachios, for example, taking what could be a common-or-garden piece of observational stand-up and elevating it through passion, exaggeration and inspired analogy into something quite transcendent.

He’s technically skilled, too, building each yarn up through well-timed twists and dodges that keep the audience gripped and chuckling. This scruffy 36-year-old may portray himself as something of a feckless loser, but the skill that goes into the construction and the phrasing of these hugely effective routines suggests he has got a keen comic mind and done the graft to know how to convey that.

Review date: 8 Apr 2014
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett