This, Kiwi comic Jeremy Elwood cheerfully admits, is just one of those festival nights. Just a small handful of people are gathered in a room ill-designed for stand-up. At the back, hardcore drinkers chat away as their all-day session wears on, while to the side punk fans kill time until their band comes on later in the evening by playing video games.

But it quickly becomes clear that Elwood is the consummate professional. Not only must the show go on, but he plays the room exactly for what it is, chatting genially to every member of the audience as he skips briskly through his extended set.

It’s obvious from his delivery and material, that he’s an accomplished club comic. The subject matter is of the broadest kind – starting with alcohol and sport, moving on to calls for pot to be legalised and after a superficial touch on religion and politics (verdict: both bad) he closes with something on sex toys.

But despite limits of topics, he covers them with a lightness of touch and instant amiability that appeals. And he does at least find the oddest of sex toys to talk about…

His forte, though, is not so much stand-up, where he is clearly a solid journeyman rather than a brilliant artist, but in his music.

Elwood can produce jolly toe-tappers in any style, performed with infectious vigour. Tracks that stand up in their own right, rather than lame lyric-switching affairs, including spot-on parodies of everything from Irish rebel songs to rock ballads. And his tour de force is to improvise a song around the lives of two audience members, switching genres on demand.

It’s all good, undemanding fun, more than papering over the gaps in inspiration in his stand-up.

Reviewed by Steve Bennett
Melbourne, May 2006