Melbourne International Comedy Festival review by Steve Bennett

In the sitcom of life, Michael Hing is a badly-written character. He makes bad choices that lead him into humiliating scrapes with little rhyme or reason, seemingly acting out of no other motivation than to deliberately look ridiculous.

It makes him hard to root for - even a naive nitwit is usually driven by some fundamental desire. But in his anecdotes you can rarely fathom what he was thinking, and he rarely comes across sympathetically.

In one story, for example, a white girl approaches him on a beach and says ‘hello’ in poor Chinese. Rather than explain that he doesn’t speak the language or replying back in English, he just stares ahead, ignoring her repeated – if very misguided – attempts to make a connection. It seems like a dick move…

Likewise, when a girl he takes home from a club passes out in the car, he makes great pantomime of the way he acts fear of what ‘people’ (whoever they might be at 3am in the suburbs) might think. Fearful of being seen as a predator preying on the intoxicated, he puts on an unconvincing camp to convince the paramedics he’s gay, maintaining the fragile facade right through to breakfasting with her parents – and ultimately ends up looking far worse than if he’d played the situation like a normal person.

Of course comedy wouldn’t exist without the socially weird, but there’s a disconnect between Hing’s casual presentation, as if he’s an affable if geeky Everyman, and the extremes of odd behaviour he describes. His stories are certainly memorable for that reason, even if there’s often too much extraneous detail in their telling, as well as the lack of certainty over other you should empathise with such dysfunctional conduct, relayed so matter-of-factly.

So Hing has a good stock of comically humiliating anecdotes, also an emotional detachment as a first-hand storyteller that means the painfully titled Much Ado About Not Hing is more curious than hilarious.

Review date: 6 Apr 2015
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival