Melbourne comedy festival review by Steve Bennett

You can take the boy out of the country, but Nick Capper still exhibits plenty of the traits you might expect from a son of a pecan nut farmer, with an unhurried pace and tendency for the mind to wander into its own surreal fantasies, possibly aided by dope. That’s pure supposition, but he does have  a weed-casualty air of detachment from the world.

His tales from farm life have a distinctly absurd twist, although they often start from a place that might JUST be true. Maybe his father did do an online robotics course so he could invent a firework-armed drone to wreak lasting psychological damage on the cockateels threatening his crops, however unlikely that sequence of words is. 

That premise provides the most rickety of frameworks for the show as Capper, who by his own admission is ‘not that intelligent’, undertakes his own Open2Study courses, each providing the basis for a new routine. What esoteric facts he’s learned has certainly made him Australia’s leading comedian for kelp-based material – surely the future of stand-up, he believes, as audiences tire of relationship-based staples.

There are also tales of woe from his weird life as a road comedian, with gigs such as filling In Between strippers – much in the same way as many of the British comedians from the golden age of television earned their stripes at London’s notorious Windmill Club – and of being paid not in money, but the promise of ‘exposure’. 

This is a familiar, and entirely justifiable, complaint of anyone working in the arts, and Capper’s angle that you can’t pay your rent with ‘exposure’ is the usual response. He escalates the issue to an absurd degree, though the gear-change into surreal grinds, with the result being more a convoluted sequence of random imaginings than a self-contained world.

That gets to the heart of the issue that Capper could be a much better editor – and indeed, the advertised 50 minute show ran closer to 70, needlessly so. A blue-sky thinker, he has plenty of imaginative ideas – and when these all pull together he creates a peculiar take on reality that has quirky appeal and images you’ll remember.

Yet at other times the absurdity seems more contrived and strained, and a touch more discipline wouldn’t go amiss if he’s to step up from those awful gigs he describes and into a world of professionalism. Heaven forfend that should ever happen!

Review date: 30 Mar 2018
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett