Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

With a boost from appearing on the latest season of Taskmaster NZ, Abby Howells had been enjoying a higher  profile in the past few months. And what better way to use that exposure than for settling old scores?

The winsome Kiwi has wonderfully petty beefs with both the small-town improv group where she started performing and Puzzling World – a South Island tourist attraction that she always purposefully misnames. This latter feud she has taken all the way to national television. 

That both these frivolous disputes have been escalated illustrate Howells’s appeal: she’s endearing and kooky, but with steel and tenacity beneath the whimsy.

Walking on stage in a powder-blue Victoriana dress to the banjo-and-falsetto strains of long-forgotten 1960s singer Tiny Tim, Howells certainly strikes an idiosyncratic figure from the get-go. And in delivery she has the same sort of off-kilter rhythms and unusual phrasing of James Acaster – using the term ‘yuk it up’, absolutely deadpan, for laughing, for instance. Then she adds her own quirks on top. 

Howells recently went viral with an internet clip about her autism, prompting her to consider the pitfalls of fame – from Tiny Tim’s flash-in-the-pan career to Michael Jackson impersonators who let it go to their heads, even in rural New Zealand.

For her own moment in the sun – though the best is surely yet to come –  she combines a warm and self-effacing celebration of her peculiarities, such an obsession with obscure facts, with broader comments on the likes of daily microaggressions.

Such is her quirkiness that it’s a surprise when some routines come across as familiar, such as her calling out God as an absentee dad to Jesus, or her long Charlie and The Chocolate Factory parody that hits common beats about the Oompa-Loompas  being enslaved labourers and the high child mortality rate of a factory tour

But beyond these, it’s her charming, skittish silliness that leaves the strongest impression – and which is almost certain to lead to bigger platforms on which to pursue her inconsequential vendettas.

Review date: 11 Apr 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival