Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

Last year, Noah Szto won Melbourne’s best newcomer title with a modest but charming storytelling show performed in a tiny karaoke room away from the main festival venues.

What a difference a year makes. Now he’s selling out every night and adding extra gigs in a prestigious 250-seater in the town hall. Meanwhile, his energy has transformed from friendly boy-next-door to charismatic TV-ready star, offering the full all-singing, all-dancing entertainment package.

Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised at the transformation since Szto has always been an overachiever. At school, he got near-perfect exam scores, leading to career in medicine, which means he’s combining this barnstorming comedy festival run with shifts on the wards. He’s also good-looking and pretty buff. Yet as much as all this might make you want to hate him, you just can’t. He’s just too damn likeable.

No prizes for guessing what Med School is about, and Szto spends the first half of the show exploring the the tug-of-war between going into medicine because of the expectation of immigrant parents and wanting to follow his own path into comedy. It’s a familiar dilemma and, truth be told, he spent rather too much time establishing it.

Not that there’s ever a dull moment in this hour thanks to Szto’s lively delivery, megawatt charisma, AV presentation and propensity to slip into a melodica break or cabaret-style musical number to keep the show chugging at pace. There’s even a puppet. 

He finds the demands of medical school a challenge, the first time his self-belief has wavered and the first time he has been presented with difficulties to overcome. Which is definitely good for the narrative arc of the hour.  

Szto heads in to Adam Kay territory with the amusing litany of dumb things he’s said to parents and other mishaps, such as mixing up his PPE. This stuff always lands well – as demonstrated  by the phenomenal success of the Brit’s memoirs – and so it proves here, too. Of course there’s plenty of bum-based stories to further give the crowd what they want.

As also with Kay, Szto balances out the viscerally funny medical stories with more serious considerations about the stressful demands placed on the shoulders of young doctors, both medical and institutional. ‘Who cares for the carers?’ is the question that always bubbles beneath the surface.

He returns to weight the generational responsibility to have a meaningful well-paid job against his own desires, making an eloquent appraisal of each conflicting force but without, looking too deep inside himself.

For that we can rely on a unique set piece involving some medical equipment – though it seemed gimmicky and gratuitous. But Szto is warm and winsome enough to get away with anything.

Plus there’s a spoonful of sugar to help this go down in the form of his showstopping final song that cements his status as a superstar in waiting. 

Review date: 16 Apr 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival