Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

The second comedian to use a double bass in their act after the UK’s Jim Tavare, Taco Knight’s debut hour is an unfortunately underdeveloped offering.

She’s an unconfident performer who frequently emits a nervous giggle, while her show has small vision, seeming petty and irrelevant.

Much of the hour is about reliving fleeting teenage relationships (she’s barely out for that age bracket herself), but with little purpose. No story is great, and there’s no bigger picture, other than to tell us how socially awkward she is.  We knew. And this inexperienced comic not yet able to own that on stage, and doesn’t have the jokes to back it up.

Similarly, complaining about her time working in hospitality is nothing more than grumbles about her shifts getting cancelled at short notice and her boss’s annoying turn of phrase, with no elaboration. It just sounds like a typical post-work whine.

A Knight’s Taco – even the title doesn't work –  is underwritten from the start. She introduces her instrument, who she calls Terry, with a song – or rather a series of couplets rhyming as clunkily as greetings card poetry – which is wildly inconsistent, sometimes addressing it as the double bass it is, sometimes anthropomorphising it and complains about it playing too much Call Of Duty. Huh?

However, there is a chink of hope with a sweet and uncharacteristically poignant closing number that gives a glimpse of what she might be capable of. 

Entitled When I Grow Up (‘because I haven’t heard of Tom Minchin,’ she jokingly protests) it offers a considered look at how she’s measured up to her childhood dreams. This could have been the seed for a lovely show... perhaps next time? 

Review date: 8 Apr 2019
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett