Review by Steve Bennett

At a strip club, being thrown out of a country for a drink-driving conviction, being stoned off his tits at work and abusing an animal… these are the settings for Kyle Kinane’s stories. He’s an authentic, hard-living, burger-lovin’ road comic, who’d probably be doing stand-up at a truck stop for beer money if he wasn’t at the Fringe.

But after 16 years in the business, he’s now starting to get some recognition; those experiences on the seedy side of life providing a rich source of first-hand anecdotes. He may jokingly call them ‘personal atrocities’, but there’s no real self-censure in a show that he insists will preempt any criticism if he gets any more famous. To avoid that, he’s taking the skeletons out of his closet now and parading them for all to see.

Such hard-living tales attract a higher proportion of beer-swilling blokes in plaid lumberjack shirts than you’d statistically expect; one of whom, very worse for wear, kept shouting barely coherent cries of unwanted support at the stage, to his girlfriend’s obvious embarrassment. The heckles were water off a duck’s back to the laid-back Kinane, but did lead him to end the show with a long story about his days as a pizza delivery boy that he never intended, and wasn’t quite the same compelling draw as the others.

But it feels as if he’d have a yarn for any occasion, delivered with well-practised rhythms and timing to keep the momentum going. Without deliberate ‘acting’, he brings to life the characters in his stories, too, from strippers to the beautifully mannered guards who had him ejected from Calgary airport.

Before he gets into this he straight-off-the-bat nails the cliches of Fringe posters, which means you’ll think of him every time you see a stand-up in a certain pose. It feeds into the image of him as a comic who tries to avoid any of the artifice of festival shows; being just a bloke with his hard-won, hard-luck stories. In that, he is the real deal.

Review date: 31 Aug 2015
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Underbelly Cowgate