Melbourne comedy festival review by Steve Bennett

This is a birthday show not for Rod Quantock himself, but his career. Fifty years ago he first took to the Melbourne stage, amid the global political upheaval of 1968. 

Students were rioting in Paris, the civil rights movement in America was at its most potent, inspired by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, and the Prague Spring movement was standing up to Soviet aggression in Eastern Europe.

Quantock’s satire is a clear product of those turbulent, but hopeful, times. Yet today as comedy thrives, those with a political imperative are in the minority… and of those, most are concerned with changing society by making individuals more attuned to subjects such as feminism or LBGTQI rights. Fifty years on, Quantock remains a standard-bearer for those with the grander, less fashionable, ambition of wanting to see the whole inequitable systems of world power dismantled.

His audience are of a similar generation to him – a straw poll of under-50s sees few hands in the air – and there’s a strong sense of community in his performance, united by shared politics and by the familiarity of being with such a long-serving comedian yet again.

Sometimes the show is so relaxed it feels just like a chat as he grumbles about his ageing ligaments or gets wound up by the newspaper headlines, but as he gets increasingly exasperated by the state of the world, the passion that still burns will distill into a bitter joke.

Otherwise, the hour has the tone of a lecture. Old-school as he is, he gets his chalk out to sketch a map of the world on a giant blackboard, to highlight apocalyptic flashpoints, from North Korean nukes to the mess we made of Iraq, from Cape Town running out of water to the melting icecaps. 

It’s a doomsday scenario he paints, with venal politicians, the greedy one percent and Rupert Murdoch (of course) complicit in the misery. He can highlight the bleak absurdity of it all – with the occasionally barbed ad hominem attack – but the punchlines often leave an astringent aftertaste. And it is as much an education – or at least a recap – about global misery  as it is a comedy.

There are no happy payoffs, no inspiring words to send us happy into the night… yet his bleakness is strangely reassuring, that someone else sees the world as broken and is trying to do something about it, however futile. And of course what leftie doesn’t like hearing an insult hurled at enemies like right-wing columnist Andrew Bolt?

Review date: 2 Apr 2018
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival