Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

Enthusiasm and vim can be vital parts of a live comedy show… but when that’s all you have, the results are usually vacuous.

That’s where we are with Jake and Liv. Their high-octane narrative sketch show, We Forgive You, Patina Pataznik, falls down with a flimsy story that seems to be little more than an excuse not to have to write endings to sketches. 

They are appealing, perky performers – Olivia McLeod especially – but can’t focus their camp energy enough to have impact. Their comedy festival debut is a time-travelling high school revenge fantasy described as mixing ‘early-2000s nostalgia, magical realism and camp horror’. Everything thrown into the blender.

A reunion reminds Jake (Glanc) and Liv that their lives were ruined ten years earlier when the titular Patina Pataznik, the school’s alpha girl, showed everyone a video that destroyed their reputation. So they nip back a decade with the aim of buying a gun and killing her. However, the characters are so flimsily drawn and the ‘plot’ so loosely contrived and casually resolved, that the story never engages.

A couple of scenes have their charm, especially Liv encountering a spaced-out gun-store owner – a genuinely amusing wacky character – while a car chase scene making good use of their projected backdrop and simple theatrics is stylish. 

But a lot of the time their chaotic energy tries to conceal the paucity of content. The shoot-out with cops, the revelation of that cringe-inducing video, or the fast-forward run through Jake imaging his life together with a classmate – marriage, kids, the lot – is all noise.

The duo have promise and connect well with the Gen Zs in their up-for-it audience. If they can harness their performance pizzaz to a more compelling story, proper characters and a clearer sense of what universe they inhabit they could be on to something. But for the moment, that’s an awful lot of ‘ifs’.

The final performance of Jake and Liv: We Forgive You, Patina Pataznik is at The Motley Brewhouse at 8.45pm tonight.

Review date: 12 Apr 2023
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival