Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

If you were looking for generalisations, you would say that the trademark of New Zealand comedy was a low-key, modestly upbeat presentation of off-kilter ideas. And that describes Guy Montgomery to a T.

There’s something hugely appealing about his quiet command of the room and his idiosyncratic take on the world, with every routine built upon distinctive ideas and an impeccable internal logic.

Even when discussing topics as universal as lockdown, he finds his own path and leads us down it in an unhurried way. On whether to have children, for example, Montgomery suggests the assumption everyone will is just a default ‘factory setting’ that could be overwritten. I’ll wager no one has ever put it in anything like those terms before.

Some of the longer routines, such as his A-Z of healthy eating or his riff on small talk, perhaps require a bit of patience from the audience to stick with his peculiar trains of thought. But he always rewards that attention with a wry, quirky line that delights.

The material is undersold, and the better for it. A quiet  throwaway about the two ways you could wear a bumbag shines for the casualness with which he makes the observation, rather than making an over-the-top pantomime of the act-out. Another one-liner about the big change he’s made to his lifestyle to combat climate change is allowed to hang in the air to allow the audience to get the gag at their own pace,

Although there’s a good level of dry absurdity to his material, it is rarely odd just for the sake of being odd (though an exception might be his conceptual pitting of numbers against letters)

Almost everything is rooted in a real observation, a snippet from his life or even a wider social point. He slyly smacks down sexism in the media with a flourish and reveals how his move to New York to make it there ended with him returning to New Zealand, penniless, to set up a new life with a new partner… just weeks before the toughest lockdown anywhere in the world kicked in.

Montgomery – a star of the New Zealand version of Taskmaster – complains about being stuck in his own mind for the past two years, but that’s clearly been a fertile place to be. The harvest is this unique hour of charmingly offbeat stand-up, and it’s bountiful.

• Guy Montgomery: Guy Montgomery By Name, Guy Montgomery By Nature is at the Westin, Melbourne, at 9pm Tuesdays to Saturdays and 8pm Sundays until April 24.

Review date: 6 Apr 2022
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival