Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

It’s been just five years since Aaron Chen made his Melbourne comedy festival debut, performing an almost painfully awkward anti-comedy show in a tiny ad-hoc room built off the side of a hotel bar. My conclusion then: ‘He’s never going to be for everyone.’

Come 2022 and he’s playing in the 1,000-seater Atheneum every night of the festival – with extra shows at the near 3,000-capacity Palais. All the raw, awkward shyness is gone, and while he’s still relatively deadpan and static, he’s in command of his performance and palpably happy to be on stage, constantly smiling.

He serves up some imaginative, quirky one-liners as he relates his everyday experiences – gags about such ordinary topics as his phone number or camomile tea are stand-outs. And there are some sneaky callbacks to give a rewarding illusion of structure, however slight.

Between the chunks of material, he indulges in some crowd work to vary the rhythm. At first, these are fairly pedestrian, using the familiar pattern of determining a punter’s job, then asking ‘what’s your favourite <insert word relating to the profession here>?’ But after a couple of unrewarding dives into the front row, he finds a way to pull the responses together into something stronger, landing solid laughs.

Some of Chen’s longer stories don’t quite have the payoff the set-up demands, such as his uneasy journey with an Italian taxi driver, but there are enough peculiarities in the details to keep the audience on board. He’s obviously a comic on the rise – even before his nomination for the most outstanding show of the festival – boasting a keen ear for absurdity and a winning low-status stage persona.

You know, he might just be for (almost) everyone…

Review date: 24 Apr 2022
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival