Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

What a superlative display of gimmick-free stand-up this is: precision-engineered and hilariously funny at every beat. 

Celia Pacquola opens I’m As Surprised As You Are with the tongue-in-cheek boast that she and her partner have become the first heterosexual couple ever to have racked up an unimaginable achievement… and had a baby. But from universal experience, brilliant and unique comedy is mined – definitive proof that no subject is hack, only how it’s approached. ‘It’s not an unusual story,’ the erstwhile Dancing With The Stars champ says. ‘But it is, because it’s me.’

So begins a quick catch-up of her life in the five years since she last performed a stand-up show, with all the gossipy energy of a reunion with a mate with whom you can cut the chit-chat and get straight to the juicy stuff. 

Pacquola’s confessional yarns start with her explaining how her previous relationship didn’t survive Covid but how, during lockdown, she found both a new man and a worryingly weird gift for her TV co-star Luke McGregor. Variously over the hour, she buys a house, loses out on an acting role that could have changed her life, and helps in the search for a missing cat and more, before we get to childbirth.

That occasion, already ripe with indignity, takes on a bizarre twist when she tells us – with unabashed candour – of how the medical repair work had consequences that feel like they could only have happened to her. 

And that’s the nub of her appeal. That she’s apparently a 41-year-old Everywoman, a bit messy in her life (but never out of control), and maybe prone to saying the wrong thing. Yet weird things keep happening to her – like finding out her new house may be haunted.

Each of the charming, engaging anecdotes are framed perfectly, with just enough detail included or excluded to maximise the funny. Then Pacquola then tags the absurdities and humiliations she’s described with pin-sharp gags.

Descriptions of everything from cartoon-like removal men to arguments with her Google voice assistant are witty and evocative while the writing is tight, both in individual jokes and in long shot, with every line serving a purpose, if not now, then further down the set.

Her frankness is disarming, too, on matters physical and mental, as she discusses postpartum depression – less for sympathy than for laughs.

But there is a heart to the show, for who would not root for this utterly likeable comic and her new family? And once she’s built that empathy you can be sure she’s going to exploit it for a joke undermining it.

Pacquola might not portray herself as a classy person, but I’m As Surprised As You Are is a classy show, drum-tight in writing and execution and constantly delivering laughs from the gut. 
 

• Celia Pacquola: I’m As Surprised As You Are has finished its Melbourne run, but has other dates around Australia later this year.

Review date: 8 Apr 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett