Melbourne comedy festival review by Steve Bennett

‘You know when you’re on holiday and you have to do some work and you’re heart’s not really in it?’ travelling comic Jim Gaffigan asks his Melbourne audience, rhetorically.

Whether that’s really true is harder to fathom, since the pale-faced stand-up never shows an ounce of effort or enthusiasm on stage. Standing stock-still, he reflects on his poor diet and non-existent exercise regime in his laconic half-whine. He is the ultimate schlub, a dumb, unambitious fella wanting the easy life, browbeaten by his wife and five children. 

Such unemotive delivery means he’s unlikely to take audiences on a wild emotional ride; but for all his self-deprecating shtick about being lazy, he’s an astute observer of the world, and especially his failings in it, with the sort of well-polished material that doesn’t happen by chance.

And a genuinely shiftless comic wouldn’t have five stand-up specials, two books, an eponymous  sitcom and a string of movie and TV credits to his name, including the imminent Chappaquiddick film, as well as his current globetrotting.

His travels have informed some of his material. There’s nice take on the Australian habit of abbreviating everything, sardonic comments about New Zealand (‘your Canada’) and his jaunts around Europe, from eating reindeer in Arctic to cheeseboards in France, so rich compared to his American cheddar-in-a-can tastes. Yes, food has always been a staple of his work – people still quote his signature bit about the Hot Pockets snacks – though the topic is comparatively rationed here. Not that he’s turned healthy, the likes of marathon-runners still baffle him.

Yet even when he’s being dismissive of the world, the joke’s always really on him for not getting it, not the direct targets of his humour. When he’s describing his home life for instance, your sympathies lie with his wife Jeannie, where it would be too easy to portray her as a stereotypical nag. Perhaps it helps having her as a writing partner.

Whenever he says something that even the most delicate snowflake could take as offensive (which is very rare, Gaffigan is famously a swear-free comic), he adopts his trademark sotto voce to reflect their offence. ‘I’ve never witnessed so much homophobia!’ he typically protests. 

Everything is rooted in the everyday, even a significant story about two-thirds through his 70-minute set, where he speaks of how Jeannie underwent a nine-hour operation earlier this year to remove a tumour from her brain. The impact and poignancy of what must have been a terrifying experience is glossed over. Instead Gaffigan turns the ordeal on himself, with typically self-deprecatory lines about how the doctors dumbed everything down so he would understand.

Another medical procedure provides the climactic routine of the night, and the funniest, running a very amusing chunk about in-laws into second place. 

No one is surprised when a middle-aged male comic mines a colonoscopy for laughs, given the very idea of a camera up the jacksie is as innately funny as it is humiliating. But Gaffigan discovers new angles, with jokes others never thought of. For even if his topics, and even the perspective of his own slobbiness, aren’t groundbreaking, he can find original wit within them.

Review date: 3 Apr 2018
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival