Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

Guy Montgomery can’t believe he’s a man, let alone a stepdad. At heart, the 34-year-old is a big dumb kid with an active imagination who just wants to play. Mind you, that imagination may well have been boosted with a fair few drugs – doing weed, ketamine and acid all get a mention.

Luckily his comedy is of the giggly stoner kind, when everything seems funny and ridiculous, rather than the lethargic kind. Indeed, his mind must be pretty active to come up with all the absurd imagery and offbeat one-liners he shares. At his best, there are few better at combining oddity with punchlines.

He’s affably flippant about most things, which makes his gentle absurdity appealing – although he does get sincere about spending time with his seven-year-old stepdaughter, which, of course, endears this goofy chump even more. The fact that living with a woman and a girl means his life naturally passes the Bechdel Test sparks a stand-out routine about meeting the threshold for non-sexist movies in real life.

Occasionally, he might draw on a deeper point, such as corporations’ approach to the climate crisis, but it’s always in the service of something silly. Similarly, he takes one restaurant’s over-ambitious marketing manta literally, to great effect. 

The comic – who's breaking through to bigger audiences thanks to his stint on the New Zealand Taskmaster  – is so committed to the daft gag that even thanking the audience for coming becomes a quirky riff, and he’s able to spin a good few minutes about something as mundane as going to buy some terrible, overpriced pyjamas. But even with his invention, he can’t disguise that this is a very slight yarn, however cutesy it is for his interactions with his stepdaughter. 

It’s not the only time he over-eggs a routine, and not all the material has the flair of originality that marks out his best work: robots being thwarted by websites’ captcha security systems, for instance, is an increasingly common comedy trope.

But there’s plenty of material here the likes of which you’ll hear nowhere else, delivered with delightful immaturity.

• Guy Montgomery: My Brain is Blowing Me Crazy is at the Victoria Hotel at 9pm (8pm Sundays, no show Mondays) until April 23

Review date: 13 Apr 2023
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett