Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

Yes, his name is like a certain best actress Oscar-winner, and yes, he has got a sketch about it. But that’s about the only thing predictable about Oliver Coleman, who makes his mark on the comedy festival circuit with this frenetically disorderly hour of high-octane absurdity.

The reckless abandon of this newcomer’s intense performance and off-the-wall writing leads to manic highs – and a few lulls. But when he gets it right, he hits some dizzying peaks of manic invention.

His oddball fun starts even as the audience saunter in, as he reads a lists of unlikely rules for the pool party this show is allegedly based on. The premise is quickly abandoned, to the sadness of one wonderfully surreal creation who wanders in later, but the best  advice is to plunge in and submerse yourself nonetheless.

High points include his recreation of a 1983 New York comedian, even more feverish in his delivery than ‘silly goose’ Coleman himself, his hawking of some unlikely merch, and his wacky new gameshow, ‘what’s that doing in there?’

He’s so inventive that it’s surely inadvertent that a fake mindreading skit has been done by others, while a few of the odder sketches are head-scratchers rather than rib-tickers.

But you can’t fail to be swept up in his supercharged delivery and creative mind, with the show swinging so wildly this way and that you never know what's coming.

While it superficially appears to be all stuff and nonsense, the show is underpinned by Coleman having an existential crisis that fuels the appealing desperation of his full-on performance, giving a bit of edge to the silliness. And so a cult is born.

Review date: 9 Apr 2019
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival