Melbourne International Comedy Festival review by Steve Bennett

Her material – about life lessons learned the hard way – is so intensely personal, but Jen Kirkman’s delivery of it is strangely aloof, at least tonight. It’s more like a rehearsed reading of an essay she’s prepared than the natural ebb and flow of a conversational stand-up sharing intimacies. She takes to the stage, says her bit, and disappears with little ceremony, and certainly none of the playfulness she exhibited with many of the same routines in London last year.

Fortunately, though, the script she has so carefully memorised is insightful and witty, full of hard-won wisdom from her 40 years about births, death, marriages and relationships – which just about covers the gamut of major human experience. Her outlook, summarised by the title can seem bleak, but she makes it simply pragmatic. Even in marriage half the people will die alone, it’s plain statistics… and it’s normally the men who go first, leaving the women hanging on. She had a glimpse of what the final hours could mean when her father was taken seriously ill, described in a routine that manages to contain the poignancy of the situation, her no-nonsense attitude, and some gallows humour.

Kirkman has no urge for children – to the chagrin of her uncomprehending parent pals – and seems to have lost her appetite for marriage, since she tried it and it didn’t work out. The farce of the wedding ceremony should have been a harbinger; the fact there was no spark of sexual passion the killer. The take-away lesson is not to take huge life decisions because it seems somehow ‘expected’.

Post break-up she had a go at being a ‘cougar’, a term she professes to hate, taking home a 20-year-old drummer. But the age difference was a mood-killer, although it has given her plenty of fodder on how life changes between 20 and 40. She’s also strong at extrapolating the personal to the general, too, such as considering how a man dating a younger woman would be so much less of an issue.

By the end we know her because she’s told us so much, even as she’s showing us so little with the semi-detached delivery. But we are in no doubt that she’s opinionated, unsentimental and eloquent in her often barbed insights into modern mores.

Review date: 9 Apr 2015
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival