Melbourne comedy festival review by Steve Bennett

Danielle Walker is a winsome performer, who paints an appealingly quirky picture of isolated rural life in north Queensland, complete with the peculiar cast of characters that are her family.

But this show is an over-reach, with her ideas struggling to fill 45 minutes. Decent anecdotes are padded out with sub-par jokes that dilute what would have been a strong 20 minute set. And never is that more apparent than with the cutesy cartoons of pigs she keeps returning too on her PowerPoint, even if they amuse her more than her audience.

She has an unaffected manner, with unforced, nervous giggles to herself at the end of every sentence. It’s a tic which is potentially irritating, but generally succeeds in giving her performance a  patina of naivity in keeping with her shtick of the awkward county girl reporting back to the city sophisticates. She’s 25, but seems younger.

Her relatives provide the bulk of her comedy fodder, from the granddad who has literally dug his own grave – and whose ‘affectionate’ nickname for Walker gives her show this title – to her mother who struggles to give up swearing.

There’s an attempt at some deeper analysis of her background when she traces her birth father – another eccentric and apparently quite the ladies’ man – but the story hasn’t much impetus and is something of a damp squib, little more than a brief gallery of pictures lifted from social media.

Walker sometimes shows an unexpected bit of bite, from a stiff rebuke to a predatory male to a routine about pregnant elephants that meanders too much, but has a darkness at its core. Such sections suggest there are extra layers to be mined in the alternate universe Walker describes.

It’s a bit of a shame the 2016 Raw Comedy winner has shot her load with a debut performed too early, because she has a comic viewpoint all her own – she just needs better skills at exploiting it, especially given how exposing such longer shows can be.

Review date: 9 Apr 2018
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival