Review by Steve Bennett at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival

Anne Edmonds hits the audience hard with her opening joke, a bad-taste switcheroo that would do Sarah Silverman proud

But it’s delivered with a sort of cheeky ‘gotcha’ rather than any real edge – for despite what the title might hint at, this is not shock comedy.  In fact, she goes on to take aim at Jim Jefferies and the sort of predominantly male crowds who bray for his brutal material.

Instead, Edmonds sketches a series of character portraits based around the strange quirks of folk she’s encountered, images which build up to a bigger picture of Australia as a land of the peculiar. Her mum might emit the frequent, exasperated cry of ‘I’m surrounded by lunatics!’  – but that figurative phrase is made real by Eddo’s cast of functional oddballs.

And she doesn’t exclude herself from that picture, happy to admit her failings, especially when it comes to her habit of repeatedly dating unsuitable men. In fact, her perspective is so warped that one of the weirdest sights she portrays is a happy family out camping, their mannered exchanges and supportive attitude creepily alien to her dysfunctional life. But it’s not just her, we all find such Stepford-Wives style perfection disconcertingly weird.

As with her mum’s catch-cry, phrases and mannerisms certainly resonate with Edmonds, who uses them to clearly define the people she’s describing. The title of the show, for instance, comes from a wonderfully unselfaware woman she encountered who’d say ‘no offence none taken’ without ever waiting for the response, allowing her to plough on with her inappropriately blunt comments. Best of her cast of characters is the slack-jawed assistant in a shoe-shop, whining and lazy in her job. We’ve all been served by her.

There’s some physicality to some of the scenes, too, such as the comedy walks she gives to a downtrodden medieval serf, to hunchback pose she imagines adopting to repel the pesky males (they are not always her favourite of all the genders).

All these stories are told with descriptive detail, which sometimes – but certainly not always – figleafs for slightly mundane material. But what’s really missing is some narrative to thread her vignettes together and give the audience something to invest in. Very artificially, they are framed around a Christmas trip to Vanuatu, each self-contained chunk allegedly a story she told to her weary travelling companion, but it doesn’t disguise the fact they are stand-alone routines.

Still, her comic performance skills, which combine the subtle with the broad to eke out the humour in each character, ought to have the casting agents calling.

Review date: 7 Apr 2017
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett