Review by Steve Bennett at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival

If likeability was currency, Jennifer Wong would be rich. 

But there’s more to life, and comedy, than that. And even though you want this amiable mild-mannered stand-up to succeed, both her show and her writing is too lightweight to hit the mark.

As a multi-lingual comedian, she likes to explore language – though the faux English lesson of the title is just a ruse – and especially puns. However what she shoehorns into her set are rarely particularly inventive ones. 

Sometimes she makes up in quantity what she’s lacking in quality, such as a string of gags about mushrooms (how she got on the topic is immaterial) which ends in the schoolyard classic about being a ‘fungi to be with’. You might as well buy a joke book.

The wordplay is not delivered with flamboyance that might sell their corniness; but with a sort of cheeky pride that she’s completed the intellectual exercise of working her way through a list of mushroom types, and come up with some fairly straightforward near-homonyms. 

Talking around some of the quirkiness of the English tongue is more fruitful, particularly when she ponders the difference between primer and foundation in make-up, given that they appear to have the exact-same meaning.

But mostly  the jokes she pins on to her monologue are so gentle, even on a big ugly target like Donald Trump, that they are ineffectual.  Even at the very end of the show, she has to point out: ’That was my finish,’ as things end with a whimper, not a bang.

Being so negative about such an endearing performer might seem like punching a kitten, but her material definitely needs more work.

Review date: 18 Apr 2017
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