Review by Steve Bennett at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival

On leaving Angus Gordon’s debut show, we’re all handed a three-page, tightly-spaced academic tract on antagonism in art, citing Rirkri Tiravanija’s relational installations, the post-structural revision of leftist politics and Nicolas Bourriaud’s framework of relationship aesthetics.

Or to put it in more everyday lingo, this is a comedian who’s a bit up himself.

What the complex thesis gets right, after lots of intellectual grandstanding, is its conclusion: ‘Gordon does not want to make an audience comfortable, but he does want to make them laugh.’

The first part of that he has nailed, with his unemotive delivery of confronting material about dead pigeons, killing cane toads and the mortal struggle of fish caught by anglers, among other cheery crowd-pleasers. And that’s just one section of the show.

He’s out to create an unremittingly dour tone, over-explaining the routines and the thinking behind them. Laughs do come, as we need something to break the bleak tension, so we seize upon any glint in the darkness.

‘I never wanted to be a comedian,’ he says, a notion underlined by the lack of joy in the performance, It’s like he’s punishing himself, exercising some masochistic disorder that means he feels unworthy of a laugh unless it’s from agony. That becomes quite literal when instructs an audience member to punch him with proper force, and certainly he shows a distaste for real jokes.

Those post-show notes talk of how mainstream comedy offers comforting relatability, trivialising important things. No such succour here, Gordon mocks what he sees as the desperation of most comics to get a laugh with his proto-catchphrase, an agonised ‘It’s fuuuuunnny!’ delivered in pained torment, sometimes after the least funny moment. 

He’s taking this far more seriously than the audience, of course. The show opens with a three-minute close-up of his face on the giant screen as The Smiths – who else? – play. Most ignore it, chatting over the top unaware that the show has technically started. Someone makes silly shadow shapes in the beam of the projector – a juvenile gesture that gets as big a laugh as any of Gordon’s difficult material.

But it’s ambitious what he’s trying to do with this challenging brand of comedy, even if in his first show he hasn’t fully achieved it.

At the moment, Sad Boy Comedy Hour is probably best filed under ‘interesting’ more than ‘funny’. But when this sort of antagonistic stand-up is done well – as in the work of Stewart Lee or Kim Noble, of whom he would seek to be a hybrid – it can be haunting and provocative as well as transgressively funny.  Maybe he’ll get there.

Review date: 14 Apr 2017
Reviewed by: