Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

As a mash-up of over-the-top sketch comedy, documentary narrative and verbatim theatre, even creators Zach Ruane and Alexei Toliopoulos acknowledge that Refused Classification is a tough sell. That said, they’ve shifted enough tickets to have added extra shows this festival, so they must be doing something right.

Their show is about the notorious 2002 censorship controversy surrounding Ken Park, a sexually and violently graphic teen culture film from Kids director Larry Park that ended up with a de facto ban in Australia when it was refused an official classification. The case became a cause célèbre both for the likes of film critic Margaret Pomeranz, who emerged as a heroine of the free-expression camp, and Fred Nile, the right-wing Christian minister trying to shut it down.

It takes a while for Aunty Donna star Ruane and comic/film critic Toliopoulos to get to this. A preamble features a word-for-word rendition of Pomeranz and co-presenter David Stratton earnestly discussing the merits of 2 Fast 2 Furious on their SBS TV programme The Movie Show, before finally turning their attention to the Ken Park issue. The pair adopt hugely exaggerated caricatures of the level-headed Stratton and a more insistent Pomeranz.

It’s a long scene, and not the only time the pair use verbosity as a comic tool, a technique that was more irritating than amusing to me, illustrating their key dilemma in balancing out the need to get on with the narrative and go all-out for the LOLs.

Sometimes, funny moments emerge organically from what is a compelling tale, with clear stakes and clear goodies and baddies. That any mention of Nile – whose hobbies aside from censorship include homophobia and Islamophobia – is accompanied by the fires of hell gives a tiny clue as to where Toliopoulos and Ruane’s sympathies lie.

But at other times, they abandon the storytelling and lark about with a skit instead. A long, deliberately overblown scene about two cops being more obsessed with doughnuts than tackling an illegal screening of Ken Park felt infuriatingly self-indulgent given how completely they had got their audience invested in the story and its outcome by this point. Yet the majority of the room lapped up this horseplay, very much in the bold, brash style of Aunty Donna.

Minutes later, Ruane is mounting a staunch critique of censorship, arguing how religious conservatives use it as a tool to paint their opponents as being on the side of evil so as to demonise all progressive policies. (How he feels about the censorious left will have to wait for another show)

It’s that passion – and the significance of the Ken Park case – that powers this fascinating hour, with the two obvious film buffs wanting to celebrate unlikely activists like Pomeranz, fighting against suppression.

Review date: 10 Apr 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival