Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

It’s rare indeed for a comedian to come up with a routine that never gets old, but Lou Wall has achieved it with their punchy PowerPoint-led musical number based on the ever-escalating insanity of a Facebook Marketplace interaction gone awry. It’s featured in previous shows and proved the biggest viral video of this festival’s televised gala.

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Wall runs it out again here, but not gratuitously. The question they are always asked about the story is how much of it – if any – is true. The answer is… well, complicated.

Breaking The Fifth Wall is a confession that comedians lie, with audiences happy to suspend their disbelief if a yarn feels like it might be real enough. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, the old maxim goes.

But mendacity is a sliding scale, with Wall putting little white lies we use as social lubricant down one end and Donald Trump at the other. Baby Reindeer and a stand-up’s exaggerations sit somewhere in the middle. Though with a different perspective, comedians are also grouped in with serial killers, for there are similarities. Especially with the male ones. 

Editing truth can distort it, but now people pick their own truth anyway, what value have facts? And where do we stand with Artificial Intelligence which can create entirely false realities increasingly hard to spot.

Wall touches on a lot of these big issues, sometimes with how they directly affected themself and their Mental health. But Wall always puts these existential concerns a very distant second to just mucking about.

Once you’ve told the audience you’re lying to them, it opens the floodgates for multiple rug-pulls and sudden reversals of the narrative. What is a joke but a subversion of what you previously assumed to be true, and here Wall gives themself permission to do it time and again. Even pointing out the lies is sometimes just a new lie.

The ever-shifting sands work perfectly with Wall’s performance style, already a manic mash-up of audiovisual elements, from bouncy songs to faux-sincere beat poetry. Their multimedia style is so perfectly suited to a meme-driven digital world and keeps the hour barrelling along. Meanwhile, the comedian’s engaging personality, sparkling yet easy-going, sits at the centre of all the tech, never overwhelmed by it.

Directed by Zoë Coombs-Marr, herself no stranger to high-concept tomfoolery, Breaking The Fifth Wall is an absolute blast, well deserving of its place on this year’s most outstanding show shortlist. And that’s no lie.

Review date: 18 Apr 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival