Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

Dry and droll Bronwyn Kuss has, apparently, always been like this. 

She recalls one teacher in smalltown Queensland telling her: ‘You’re so cynical, you will have a sad little life.’ That educator reckoned without comedy, where cynicism can be an asset – especially in Kuss’s skilful hands, where it informs her waspishly pointed attitude.

Another trait from school that has influenced her comedy style is her hatred for the drama kids. That surely must go some way to explaining why there’s not a milligram of showbiz pizzazz in her arid performance.

Deadpan is a harder style to pull off than it appears, running the risk of boring an audience with an unenthused delivery. But Kuss demonstrates a firm command of the style, using the deliberate silences to build tension, the quiet volume to get the audience to lean in, and her emotional detachment to be amusingly blunt when needed.

She is a gifted writer, too, with sharply witty observations and an ability to vividly create scenes and characters with powerful efficiency. Describing a man as ‘having Band-Aids where his eyebrows should be’, tells you all you need to know. 

He pops up in a story about Kuss discovering a woman passed out in the street and doing her best to help out, which forms a loose narrative thread for much of this engaging hour and sets the mood for comedy that doesn’t mind probing the seedier side of life. Indeed, this show sometimes ploughs into the dark and the graphic, but there’s safety in Kuss’s world-weary mockery. 

Her writing is stealthy, too, laying groundwork in her depictions that pay off in punchlines later, and callbacks that work organically, not a bolt-on offering confected closure.

As for the other part of that teacher’s assessment, about having a ‘sad life’, who knows? The comic seems to enjoy her unsmiling delivery, even if it wasn’t much of an asset when she worked in hospitality. Though the job hardly suited her, it provided her at least one uniquely odd exchange that she can use as yet another example of strange human behaviour. 

She’s in therapy – which comes as no shock as it seems to go with the territory of being a millennial and a stand-up – with her analyst forever finding new issues to address. It comes as more of a surprise to find her indulging in such woo-woo as past life regression, given the no-nonsense attitude elsewhere.

But fear not, this does dim the compelling cynicism that defines her outlook: that she’s seen enough in this life to no longer be impressed by any of it. 

Review date: 5 Apr 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival