Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

By most normal metrics, Jolly Goodfellow’s show - if indeed this unrehearsed ramble can be called anything as formal as a show – is a dismal disaster. But you get the impression normal metrics are not how he lives his life. 

He is a professional jester, who also goes by the name Rumpel. He played the Fool On The Hill in the Beatles/Cirque du Soleil show Love in Las Vegas for two years, and travels the world appearing in festivals around  such as Glastonbury in the UK and Lublin in Poland, where he once performed for 53 hours straight. 

And he can be seen in the background of various TV shows and music videos, often bedecked in his elaborate fool’s costume fashioned from neckties, which he wears for this homecoming show too.

One Big Story is essentially a scrapbook of his achievements large and small, proudly boasting of fleeting encounters with celebrities or his Facebook friendships with the drummers of mid-level rock bands or the offspring of A-listers. The achievement of which he’s most happy seems to be that Winston Churchill’s granddaughter Arabella, who used to book the circus tents at Glastonbury, named a cat after him.

These are not anecdotes with beginnings, middles and ends. ‘I only do middles’ Goodfellow notes. Instead, it’s a stream of consciousness, words tumbling over each other with no regard for comic timing or even the pacing of normal conversation, as his memory is sparked by the images he randomly browses on his laptop.

Oh, and the entire hour is delivered through a voice distorter to give him an high-pitched, robotic tone… that’s quite important, given how irritating it is – not helped by the fact the mic has a loose connection so loud crackles of static interrupt every other sentence. 

Professionalism is not Goodfellow’s friend, and over the hour he also frets about getting sound out of his laptop, then knocks out the video feed while trying to get it to work. What was trying to do with the Toy Story alien head, heaven only knows. No wonder ‘bear with me’ is one of his catch-cries.

When the mood takes him, he goes over to his overflowing box of props for a few short visual bits (‘gags’ might be too strong a word); but it’s soon back to the photos, flyers, and rather impressive bits of artwork on his computer, not assembled into a slide show, just loose in folders.

Much of this Shambles is excruciating to watch, but over time Goodfellow becomes oddly endearing – although that might be Stockholm Syndrome kicking in.  That he gets so excited by his most casual of brushes with the most tangential of famous people, even years after the event is actually quite winsome.  

He’s clearly living the unconventional life he wants, wandering the globe with fellow street entertainers and cabaret folk – and that’s made him a institution of sorts. One clip of his act shows him  skipping using a flaming rope while on a unicycle – so he’s clearly got skills, even if formal storytelling isn’t high on the list, on the basis of this rambling show. 

Review date: 11 Apr 2019
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett