Award Winning Comedian, Nik Coppin
Live Review

If you want to do a show about awards you have won, you'd better have a stunning set or you are destined to fail. Nik Coppin does the latter.

Coppin has brought a self-indulgent show to the Free Festival and sadly he doesn't manage to pull this off in a cheeky or ironic way. It's simply a run-through of various awards he's received, ranging from football to performing in front of three people in the Adelaide Fringe.

Coppin has a bubbly and friendly persona, frequently giggling at his own lines. But he never really bonded with the audience and his interaction was merely fact-finding, he had nothing entertaining to jump off to when presented with good feedback.

Overall his set was strangely structured and his stories are over-filled with superfluous information, facts and place names; plus there's a lot of name-dropping for no discernible benefit. He's like an old friend from school who you bump into and they insist on telling you what they’ve been up to for the last decade, without caring if anyone is interested or not.

By the end the stories were just relentless run-throughs of information, missing potentially more interesting if obvious gags (such as a stripper asking if he likes Brazilian women). There was only one half-heckle which is possibly surprising, given the open goals Coppin laid out, if anyone could be bothered ("anyone done anything they regret?").

‘Just go out there and have fun’ is a message Coppin tries to get over. He clearly practises what he preaches, enjoying what his is doing. Sadly he is in the minority.