Eddie Ifft: Things I Should't Have Said
Live Review

Eddie Ifft is a human Bart Simpson. A grown-up with the soul of a ten-year-old boy, always compelled to say or do something naughty, then employing his glint-in-the-eye charm and butter-wouldn’t-melt smile to make you forgive him.

In Things I Shouldn’t Have Said, this impish American plays up his propensity to cause offence, making frequent reference to how ‘wrong’ his comedy is going to be. Though on the scale of comic nastiness, he is few notches below the real hard-edged shock jocks, even if you might be wary of putting him on a family-hour TV show.

Some of the supposedly edgy material is, in fact, rather passé – at least by the warped moral values of the comedy world I’ve lost count of the number of stand-ups who invoke the image of midgets as something supposedly so offensive, while ponderings such as today’s kids having life easy because all their porn is on the end of a broadband line is positively universal. Lines on abortion and religion similarly didn’t have quite shock value – at least among a relatively broad-minded festival crowd – but you can understand that some people might take offence.

Yet he can be wilfully iconoclastic – taking daringly provocative swipes at Hudson River hero pilot Sully Sullenberger, for example – and, yes, push the envelope of taste with riffs on the word ‘retard’. Seemingly safe topics such as air travel or predictive texting are also give a distinctive twist in nicely constructed routines.

His mouth certainly does get him into trouble, as a couple of well-told yarns conclusively illustrate. He makes a convincing storyteller, which is when his charming, rascally character really comes into its own.

There are also socially-insightful routines on such topics as Americans’ excesses in a world of poverty, which is something that truly is offensive – though by targeting Americans and not the Aussies, he can engender an unjustifiable moral superiority in the audience.

He’s a skilful performer who knows how to tease and flatter, and his tongue-in-cheek arrogance produces impressive results as laughs come consistently from a fluid, efficient and sometimes challenging set that brings out the naughty boy in us all.