Melbourne comedy festival review by Steve Bennett

It’s a pretty good tease for a show: ‘In 2007 Angus Brown asked a girl he’d known for three days to marry him…’ And he did so with a kebab, rather than a ring. Whether that makes him an emotionally stunted misfit or an incurable, spontaneous romantic is pretty much the narrative of this hour. He certainly has form for inappropriate proposals, which he’s happy to share with us.

Brown is an engaging storyteller, effortlessly bringing his audience along for the ride. Which is a good job, as he falls into the trap of many relatively inexperienced comics of being a slave to a format he thinks he should have, forcing stories into the shape of the show, rather than creating something more organic.

So the main proposal story is frequently interrupted with other anecdotes about his romantic past, with the very obvious aims of building the ‘did she/didn’t she’ tension and adding some structural scaffolding to the hour. There’s also a gimmick of unveiling some pictures he’s drawn, despite having very limited visual arts talent, which is sometimes funny, sometimes not.

The other stories are a mixed bag, too… the outrageous sexual antics of his divorcee mum and her fellow middle-aged women on a drunken night out in their country town is guaranteed to entertain, but the tale of his teenage sexual fumblings seems unremarkable, even if it was an attempt at a threesome.

Routines paint him as uncomfortably weird sometimes – and although that creepiness is at odds with the perfectly personable comedian standing in front of us now, he doesn’t fully acknowledge just how peculiar such behaviour makes him seem.

Still, he eventually gets over that, allowing us to relax in a now-affable presence that boosts slight anecdotes. But if he’s going to need more substantial material if he wants audiences to say ‘yes’ to him.

Review date: 6 Apr 2016
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett