Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

In 2012, Aidan 'Taco' Jones – then aged 20 – vowed to cut back his drinking to just once a week, on average. With the sort of foresight that suggests he knew he might need a premise for a comedy festival show seven years later, he wrote about each boozy night out on a separate playing card.

The deck is now handed out around the audience, and he picks cards at random to tell his stories. Although, in truth, the brief summaries of youthful drunkenness written at the time are hardly revelatory or insightful, and the underlying story unfolds almost regardless of what is picked, even if this mechanism gives the narrative a slightly different shape every night.

Jones might have been trying to clean up his life, but it was still pretty much a wreck at the time. He took drugs, dropped out of university, had a few disastrous relationships, lived in Bolivia for a while and wound up staying in a hostel in Melbourne, doing shitty jobs as he started out in comedy, playing one open-mic dive after another.

The problem is these tales of getting wrecked and having sex are as narrow and as shallow as you might expect from an immature and wayward young man. They are also the topics that have been the mainstay of comedy for decades, and his stories are not outlandish enough to stand out or offer some vicarious escape, nor revelatory enough to serve as a salutary lesson. 

Seven years old and wiser, the engaging Jones has got some perspective on the misdeeds of his past, but not completely – for example blaming an ex for sleeping with him when he was in a new relationship seems a major abdication of his own actions.

The women in his stories here are definitely minor characters, adding to the laddish feeling instilled by the drinking stories – despite his efforts to move on and become a better person. Even so, the ebbs and flows of these short-term relationships don’t possess the emotional heft Jones would need them to have to truly engage the audience, so the stories just sound like the fickle missteps of youth.

There’s certainly an authenticity here, however  – the anecdotes don’t appear to have been exaggerated for comic effect (for better or for worse) and he hasn’t airbrushed his bad behaviour. But there’s also no real satisfying story arc or resolution… and the individual tales aren’t funny or interesting enough on their own for that not to matter, even if Jones is a personable guide through them.

52 Days might be categorised as storytelling, but that would be because it’s not funny enough to be stand-up – not because there’s a great story to be told.

Review date: 3 Apr 2019
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett