Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

Damien Power’s show must have run for about 25 minutes in Adelaide, given how much of it is devoted to giving the South Australian capital a hard time. Their Fringe audience, you see, didn’t appear to appreciate his artistic aspirations, and just wanted mainstream comedy entertainment. The philistines!

Underpinning this show is, therefore, a spirit of elitism – that his high-falutin notions are too good for his audience – as well as a gnawing feeling that the sort of comedian he’s spent 14 years striving to become is not the sort of comedian who can have a viable career in a society that only likes to snack on culture. Present company, in the heart of an arts festival in liberal Melbourne, excepted.

That’s a slightly disingenuous standpoint, given that Power isn’t really that inaccessible – and Australian comedy has even found a slot for someone as weird as Sam Simmons to make a living. 

Sure, Power talks a slightly more existential game than ‘what’s the deal with Bunnings?’, as he’s keen to point out, but he’s an affable, plain-talking guide through his thoughts. When he sets up Plato’s ‘allegory of the cave’ as a running gag, it’s largely at the expense of his own ’wanky pseudo-intellectual’ pretensions… even if he does does evoke it sincerely for a slightly clunky and anticlimactic finale.

Power’s grapples with what he wants to say cannot be extracted from where he came from, a rural Queensland backwater with a neurotic, uncommunicative father whose difficulty connecting with his sons was inherited from his own war veteran dad. ‘A waterfall of trauma,’ Power calls his ancestry of repression.

He argues compellingly that it’s no accident that he and his siblings sought escape through trying to excel in diverse fields: himself in comedy, his brother Will in motorsports, and another, Nick, in the most unlikely field of choreography.

Man Puts His Dreams In A Sock is certainly rich with ideas about what drives any person in life, based on the perspective they have on it. Brilliantly, Power skewers the entire notion of ‘follow your dreams’ using his own family’s experiences – and questions the motives of those most vocal  in promoting that philosophy, a the expense of a more satisfied society.

If you choose, there’s a lot of food for thought here, from the personal to the big picture. And if you don’t choose, there’s still plenty to enjoy in his self-effecting stories of gigs he misjudged, the communication gap with the rest of his family, and those knuckle-draggers of Adelaide.

Review date: 5 Apr 2019
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival