Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

How does Sam Campbell’s brain do it? Come up with so many ideas - all of them wildly original – that fizz and pop in this cauldron of silly insanity.

The gag rate is phenomenal, with every preposterous, uniquely offbeam premise twisting and turning into unchartered territory. Props, PowerPoints, robot arms, and even other comedians are press-ganged into service for the briefest of throwaway gags. 

But although the vibe is chaotic, with Campbell seemingly struggling to keep up with his runaway mind, every apparently haphazard moment has been fully thought through, designed to wrong-foot the audience at every turn. He never wants us quite to know where the next notion is coming from or heading to.

In his madcap performance, he has the nutty zeal, misplaced passion and absolute conviction of a conspiracy theorist – an image emphasised when he exposes a sinister message hidden in plain sight on cereal boxes, a routine that was also part of his Edinburgh Comedy Award-winning show last August. However, most of this hour, put together in the few short months since then, is new. 

Sometimes the observations are rooted in reality, such as the irritation of an out-of-office email or the faux-cutesy motivational grading on some water bottles. But even if you recognise the super-specific starting points, his over-reaction to them, and the unexpected way he expresses them, is the delight.

He looks for incongruities in the world, then creates more in his shows, entirely on his own terms. There’s a loosely running joke about his desperation to get on to the panel of Have You Been Paying Attention?, and the occasional callback, but nothing you would identify as order. 

Occasionally he gives his routines a bit of space, but that tends to dilute them, such as his bit on the relative sizes of toes, or his observation that pet shops only sell the paraphernalia, not the pets themselves. 

Similarly, an extended, bizarre gameshow drawing on ads for the life-insurance company whose cardboard cutout stands sentry throughout the show seems self-indulgent from the start. But even in all these examples, just when you think you know where you are, he throws in another surprise.

You’ll see nothing like any of the skits here anywhere else, but for all the zany surrealism, Campbell doesn’t alienate the audience but tries to convince them he’s right. He doesn’t need to convince us he’s funny.

• Sam Campbell: Every Single Emotion is on at Max Watt’s at 9.30pm (8.30pm Sundays, no show Monday) until April 15, then at 9.30pm at the Athenaeum Theatre from April 18 to 23. 

Review date: 6 Apr 2023
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival