Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

After two years of despair, living in the woods and consumed by her darkest thoughts, Laura Davis has produced a frenzied, expansive, angry manifesto against the myriad ills of the world. Thankfully, she has stand-up as an outlet, else we might have another Unabomber on our hands…

This Is It is a primal, defiant, guttural howl about the toxicity of capitalism, the monetisation of rage and fear, misogyny, culture wars, the perils of undervaluing art, the destruction of the climate, the creeping onset of a neofascist state – and so much more. Yet it’s neither preachy nor big-P political, but a cri de couer, born from hard-won personal experience that this battle-scarred comedian is determined to get heard.

It’s an hour that’s dense with ideas - ‘there’s no time to make you like me,’ she asserts before she launches into her breathlessly rapid diatribe, firing off in all directions. She’s dropping a match into a box of society’s most volatile fireworks and trying to describe how each explodes, all at once and in all directions.

If This Is It is bold and ambitious – and also very funny, except when it’s purposefully not. Her description of staring into the abyss – and then leaving an online review – is a near-perfect routine, full of knowing gags without ever shying away from the desperation of her situation. She knows her show is angry and gets laughs at the expense of her own intensity, only to be drawn back into it, even if it is ultimately impotent.

Her isolation came as she tried to move back to Australia following a few years in London. Thanks to Covid, she wound up quarantined in New Zealand for months with no more than what she had in carry-on luggage, then repeated the miserable experience in Perth, where the woods proved a more attractive proposition than her parents.

That set-up offers a few entry-level gags to ease the audience in. But as she starts to practise her stand-up to an audience of bugs, in what any outsider would consider a descent into madness, the bigger picture of a world on fire  starts to emerge.

It’s also clear Davis is a battler. She’s spent years on the fringes of comedy as lesser stand-ups have soared, and even now is playing one of the more basic rooms of the festival. But, describing this show as the anti-Nanette, she vows, unlike Hannah Gadsby, to keep doing comedy forever, no matter what: a sign that she just has so much to say.

If This Is It is so complex, fast-paced and scattergun that it would bear a second viewing. That Davis gets carried away with passion makes it superficially messy, yet ideas pop and re-form, belying the fact this frustrated rant has been more carefully considered than it seems.

That there’s so much to untangle comes at the expense of the sort of neat denouement that would be structurally rewarding. But Davis knows this world doesn’t work so conveniently and defies the easy option. She always does, and that’s what makes her such an exciting, urgent and relevant comedian.

• Laura Davis: If This Is It is on at Campari House at 9pm every day until April 24.

Review date: 7 Apr 2022
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett