John Conway: The New Conway Show in Melbourne 2011
Live Review

Daft John Conway has certainly received a good thrashing from the silly stick. His debut festival show is a rag-tag collection of stupid singalongs, pointless props, cheesy characters and barmy banter.

It doesn’t hold together very well, there are frequently moments when the madness seems too self-conscious and some ideas struggle to fly…. And yet it nonetheless works, in a charmingly amateur way, because underpinning it all is the fact that Conway simply has funny bones.

When he delivers snippets leaning towards more conventional stand-up, there are shades of the stoner ‘insight’ of Mitch Hedberg, but these are fleeting. The feel of the show – although ‘show’ seems an ambitious word – is more of a one-man vaudeville. One minute he’s having a deliberately convoluted time-travel conversation with his past and future self; the next he’s sharing his ideas for his undersea High School sitcom; the next he’s affecting the guise of British Singing Man launching a new album, a gag based almost entirely on the comedy of repetition.

It’s a scattergun approach, sometimes hitting, sometimes – when the surrealism gets too disconnected – not. However Conway’s dumb-but-gregarious personality is so inherently likeable, conventional measures of what works and what doesn’t are hard to apply. He encourages you to embrace the knockabout silliness and just go with the flow.

Although he plays up the barminess, he can be quite a smart operator, demonstrated by the way he encourages his audience to be funny when he asks questions of them, then exaggerates their wit still further. I suspect a good-natured nickname he gave one punter tonight will stick long beyond the festival’s end. Such moments mean there are frequently proper laughs to be had, beyond just the oddness of the situations he engineers.

Conway said he only had three paying punters in the room tonight, the rest of the room being ‘papered’ with freebies. But this is exactly the sort of show adventurous festival-goers should embrace; a new talent doing something different. It may be rough around the edges, but there’s certainly a lot of promise in Conway’s twisted nonsense..