Melbourne comedy festival review by Steve Bennett

Nick Capper’s family history involves encounters with Idi Amin, his father dating his mother after saving her life, and his grandfather fleeing England for Africa after finding civilian life too dull after the intensity of the Second World War and.

Yet he doesn’t half make it all dreary.

He has an almost soporifically laconic style which gives him all the charisma and presence of a regional photocopier engineer. Which is a shame as the stories themselves are often fascinating, if not always especially funny.

Capper is a simple country boy, which might explain the terminally laid-back style. He’s previously done gigs in his father’s barn and knows the tedium of driving a tractor back and forth for 12 straight hours – the only relief was one day stumbling on an emu egg, which didn’t end up well. And he has experiences of the rough isolated life in the Kalgoorlie nickel mines, where drunken fighting was the universal pastime.

He paints a picture all right, but drawing comedy out of the unusual situations often seems like extracting teeth. So you can imagine how much further the energy dips when he doesn’t have a strong basis for a story, such as his everyday observations about the chaos at the Jetstar check-in or routine that builds up to a variation of that stock throwaway: ‘Are you having a good time? Well let your face know.’ 

He comes across as a nice enough bloke, albeit a bit of a dull one. At one point he asks:  Am I a good comic or does weird shit just happen to me?’ I fear it may be option b)

Review date: 12 Apr 2016
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett