Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

Seventeen years into a comedy career, Greg Larsen has several awards and a TV career under his belt. He also finds himself broke, bitter and disillusioned, ready to call it quits on loss-making festival runs.

To bid farewell, he offers this romp through his exploits in the business, from early online videos and deranged sketch shows to unexpected roles in international dramas. His casting opposite Jamie Dornan in The Tourist aside, Geggy is a catalogue of terrible ideas, awful gigs and even worse decision-making.

He portrays himself as a wretched figure, a self-loathing ‘grub’ who just happens to have created yet another hour-long story that starts in a McDonald’s drive-thru. Well, write what you know. You wouldn’t complain about John Grisham setting all his novels at a law firm, would you?

Yet for all the disgust Larsen shows for the warped old material he performed alongside jaded road comics in dive venues to disinterested crowds, this is actually something of a perverted love-letter to that grungy world. There’s a certain romance to having adventures while pursuing an interest for the pure hell of it. At least there is for an audience getting to hear about it without having to have lived it.

Whether exaggerated or not, the frustration and resentment at not having made it – getting eclipsed by contemporaries such as Sam Campbell and Ronny Chieng – gives Larsen a powerful, desperate energy.

His story has a shabby artistry  with anecdotes full of visceral emotion as he takes us on a blistering canter through the lows and even deeper lows of a pursuit that’s left him penniless at 41. But what other options does he have? Stories of trying to get by in the real world always end in failure and misery too.

While he’s quick to blame ‘the industry’ for his plight – and there’s a sincere coda about capitalism crushing social mobility – he’s also quick to confess that his own actions, as a man with a ‘head full of piss’ are at least partly responsible. It might muddy the message about being constantly crushed by The Man, but it’s honest and, more crucially, funny, that he’s so self-destructive.

In Larsen’s skilled hands, the combination of such incompetence and a world that he believes is conspiring against him makes Geggy a raucous battle for survival, hilarious from start to finish. If this really is his swansong, the loss to the comedy festival will be keenly felt. 

Review date: 8 Apr 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival