Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

Chris Ryan is rare in being a middle-aged woman relatively new to comedy. But she has got off to a cracking start, winning best newcomer at the 2019 Sydney comedy festival and getting nominated for the same title here in Melbourne last year.

Aptly enough, she’s got some motherly advice for the audience: stop caring what other people think about you. Especially because most of the time, those people simply aren’t thinking about you at all – so shelve the anxieties and get on with life.

Not that she entirely takes her own counsel. She wants to be the clean-living woman who hydrates, meditates and gives herself regular affirmations to get a more positive outlook, but falls short. Or maybe she just wants to be SEEN to be doing all those things…

She’s a straight talker - the Kobelco overalls she wears on stage a perfect symbol of her workmanlike no-nonsense approach – and dispenses her thoughts in a low-key, conversational style that’s wryly sarcastic towards anything that earns her disdain.

Ryan is efficient in her writing, too. Almost every line is some level of joke, even if it’s just a little one to move things along, all told with few extraneous words. We can probably attribute that to her journalism background.

But this gently-delivered and eminently relatable life advice, coming from a position of small privilege, takes a turn when she reveals she has recently made a huge change on turning 50, which I won’t spoil, which saw her move from Canberra to a tiny Sydney flat.

This bite of reality adds an extra personal dimension to otherwise solid, if not earth-shattering, stories of over-zealous cosmetics saleswomen or dick pix. She’s skilled at drawing the audience into her story without making a song-and-dance about it and comes across as an interesting and warm comedian but capable of flashes of cynicism when the need arises. 

• Chris Ryan: Busy is on at The Westin Hotel at 6.20pm (5.20pm Sundays, no show Mondays) until April 23.

Review date: 13 Apr 2023
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival