Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

Callum Straford Nails Everything? No he doesn’t.

That is indeed the point of this show: that he can’t hope to, so he shouldn’t be so hard on himself when he falls short. It’s basically Straford saying: ‘My biggest weakness? I’d say I’m just too much of a perfectionist.’

He must, then, be disappointed with the lacklustre comedy he’s produced. His third festival hour is a very odd beast - a confidently performed one-man musical sketch show with all the elements… except the jokes. As if an alien being had observed the structure and rhythms of such a thing and replicated it without understanding humour.

Skits are generally short but pointless (and not in a good way). They feel like first drafts that need more work or throwaway sketches that should have been thrown away.

Listing things not to say if you want to get laid or strange phrases Duolingo offers  for translation doesn’t throw up anything a half-decent comic wouldn’t instantly come up with on the fly. The catalogue of ‘Harry Potter characters I don’t look like,’ is even more shallow. 

He does some deliberately superficial crowd work, with the only gag that it’s to the demanding timing of a beep test. A fake meditation is at real risk of putting audiences into a sleepy state.

There are a couple of bits of stand-up about a visit to India, that nation of rich diverse cultures and experiences. One tale is simply a moan that TikTok is banned there so he couldn’t keep his videos coming, affecting his algorithm. No jokes, just a very first-world gripe (though with fewer than 6,000 followers he’s no influencer yet). A second story about getting mobbed by locals is substantially better, but there’s only really one amusing observation to it, no comic expansion.

Songs might be his saviour. The stand-out is a ditty about losing his AirPods in the Yarra River, from the perspective of the earphones. But while he’s a decent melody writer, most of the lyrics of other songs are again pretty limp. At one point, he sings a Beatles number, vocally doing all the guitar sounds and, erm, that’s it, apart from the mop-top wig he dons. 

Tellingly, one of the biggest laughs comes when he simply tells people of the time Steve Martin took his entire audience out to see another show. Wish Straford had copied that idea, we might have seen something decent.
 

Review date: 10 Apr 2023
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival