Heath Franklin's Chopper: Fringe 2012
Live Review
Underbelly Bristo Square

This is a top hour of  uproariously entertaining comedy.  Heath Franklin’s comically ghastly creation is a rock-solid stand-up, a character so well cast that he seems to have an independent life, rather like Al Murray’s Pub Landlord has subsumed his creator.

The original Chopper Read is a sadistic gangster, a psychopathic dispenser of rough justice, but the comic creation is a rough diamond.  He lounges on in his tracky-dacks and swears with baroque creativity, but you couldn’t call him offensive, he’s a bogan made good and with a firm moral code.

He opened with a harshly funny comment about Susan Boyle and moved into material about airplane travel  but succeeded in breathing  new life into these well-worn subjects.   His material is the daily bread of comedy clubs the world over, stupid adverts, the Darwin awards for stupid deaths, appalling modern music, but I had heard none of it before, it was completely fresh and funny.

Franklin played with the audience’s sensibilities – the ‘look, I used to be racist...’ line immediately raised the temperature in the room and brought a frisson of anxious expectation and the show never looked back.   His simple philosophy ‘Don’t be a fucktard’ is not dissimilar to Doug Stanhope’s, but it’s dished out with less vitriol and self-loathing.  Chop clearly thinks of himself as good bloke, and you’re quite inclined to agree.

Rather as Al Murray has an unfortunate following of daft BNP types who don’t get that the comedy is sending up the nationalism, Chopper had a couple of beery self-parodists in the crowd who looked like they had come in character, plus some  whimpering drunk  fans who thought it was a double act.

These were dealt with using entertainingly sarcastic charm that was a lesson in keeping the show on track. The only slight disappointment was the audience participation segment in his ‘sitcom pilot’  which weakened an otherwise strong show.  Getting the general public up on stage is rarely interesting, and I can’t bear to watch somebody being humiliated/gently embarrassed on stage if they haven’t signed up for it in the first place.

But overall, The Hard Bastard’s Guide to Life is a great hour, packed with good gags and ‘so wrong it’s right’ moments.