Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

It’s telling that the best moment of Rowan Thambar’s debut comes when he’s not trying to be overtly funny. Instead he taps out a rhythm on the venue's wooden shelf as he recites a beat poem about being unlucky in love, which is rather charming.

But apart from a few other flourishes of musicality, the rest of the hour is largely a disappointment with weak material and a confidence beyond his 23 years that tips too easily into hubris, especially when he blames the audience for not reacting as he would like. He strikes an apparently good-natured tone with his  comments, but they are so frequent and pointed as to become a turn-off.

In fact, crowd work is not his forte: despite clear indications we didn’t want to engage, he kept going back to the room, making things more uncomfortable each time.

One example was using banter as a poorly-contrived way of shoehorning audience members’ names into a song, as if to give the impression of improv, even though the rest of the words had already been set in advance. And as such should have been funnier.

Similarly, he seems to have learned that callbacks are a thing, so randomly shoves together a few of his earlier punchlines towards the end in way to suggest closure, but screams desperation. To follow that with a deliberately anticlimactic ending is a move you can only do if you’ve already won the room over, when we’ve merely tolerated you, it again come over as arrogant.

He has a couple of good jokes, amid some clunky exposition, and the occasional engaging story, but the material is stretched pretty thin. The recollection of when he realised his brown skin made him different from his primary school friends is charming, but most the rest of his sizeable chunk of race-based material is pretty flimsy, from flirting with the n-word to making tired jokes about black guys having big dicks.

Elsewhere we learn that he had a comfortable upbringing with supportive Sri Lankan parents (bor-ring!) and had recently got dumped (de rigueur for any young comic, but not proving too fruitful here).

Although he has a demeanour beyond his years, Thambar’s show suggests the material’s a long way behind. It seems he’s been too keen to make his festival debut without having enough material, nor the experience to work best with the audience, to make a splash.

Review date: 10 Apr 2019
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival