Review by Steve Bennett at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival

As he shuffles, blinking and squinting, into the light, Luke McGregor cuts the very image of discomfort, nervously scratching at his face.

He might be in the big time now, with TV hits like Rosehaven and Luke Warm Sex bringing him the size of audience that means he can play Melbourne’s 1,000-seater Comedy Theatre for ten nights, but he remains endearingly uncomfortable with it all.

Yet as the title Almost Fixed It suggests, he’s getting better. For starters, he has a girlfriend now, and his tentative, stumbling steps into a relationship and the delight of regular sex provide some rich fodder for material as he frets how things will unfold. He can’t believe his luck, adding a sense of joy to the show, but also now he has more to lose should his idiocy mess things up, adding to the comic tension.

A professional worrywart, he may be cripplingly insecure about his very peculiar foibles – not least about the conditions he requires, OCD-like, to fall asleep. But he doesn’t mind sharing those fears for the entertainment of strangers… and hugely entertaining these extremes of nervous behaviour are, too. He’s seeing a psychologist now, another way in which he might be ‘almost fixed’, but hopefully, he’s got enough odd quirks to keep him in material for a while yet.

When it comes to self-deprecation, McGregor has it down to an art form, although some of the wider observational comedy is not so strong. The routine about salmon semen being an antidote to low blood pressure intractably ends up considering the first person to discover that medical fact; although McGregor’s acting out of the scenario brings it alive. And even on the relationship stuff, the issue of going to the toilet in front of each other is familiar stand-up territory, which he finds harder to elevate.

Despite his awkward persona, he has an easy way with the audience, working with their suggestions and nicely winding up some very tardy latecomers. Later, a routine about inappropriate poses to adopt at a funeral displays a hitherto unexplored talent for physical comedy.

But this leads feeling that McGregor’s at something of crossroads here. He’s clearly an adept comic who does this every night, so some of the nervous face-touching tics – a slightly distracting trait he shares with Canadian comedian Jeremy Hotz – start to seem artificial and disingenuous. And as he's starting to get his life together, what will become of his status as the weird, loser, outsider?

For the moment, though, there’s enough of the peculiarities to make much of this show a blast, while he still has the vulnerability that means you’ll easily forgive the more workaday sections.  

Review date: 1 Apr 2017
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett