Melbourne International Comedy Festival review by Steve Bennett

Monsterpussy suggests a show that’s going to be either crude or silly… but events that happened to Gen Fricker since submitting the title to the comedy festival programme have put rather a dark heart at the centre of her 2015 offering.

She is a beguiling presence and lets her terrifying anecdote unfold naturally, although whether there’s much comedy to be found from the experience is a moot point. However, even with tales that don’t include a threat of serious harm, big guffaws are not the order of the day.

Instead, the Sydney comic charms with a whimsical delivery that matches the laid-back ambiance of her mildly hypnotic songs. She’d normally perform some of these moodily listing melodies on guitar, but with her arm in a sling after an unlikely sounding eve-of-festival accident, it’s all keyboard now, the pared-back offering adding to their cool, dreamlike feel.

Personable but peculiar, Fricker admits the show is ‘weird-heavy’, and never more so than when she recounts odd, (hopefully) fictionalised exchanges with a high school frenemy Claire. She’s never in a rush to get to what punchlines she has, either, which is evident right from the very first story, about a strange encounter with a heckler in an even stranger show, which has a nice payoff but meanders on its way to that destination.

There is something missing to hold this show together, to make it more than the sum of its disconnected parts of offbeat stories and artsily eccentric songs. But despite the death of belly laughs, it is quirkily charming journey nonetheless.

Review date: 11 Apr 2015
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival