Adam Knox Is All Washed Up
Live Review
Melbourne International Comedy Festival

At the end of dreary 45 minutes, Adam Knox sings about a pointless life being made into a pointless story Too right.

The premise is that we’re now in 2062, and Knox is looking back over his showbiz life, from terrible mime and terrible children’s entertainer, via terrible stand-up and terrible TV talk show host and on to terrible family films. So no guessing what would be the best adjective to sum all this up.

Knox does wastes what is a potentially good idea by executing it with little parody. The life story just tediously unfolds as shabby entertainment, delivered in dreary monotone. When, in his telly monologues, he pleads between gags: ‘What else? What else?’ it’s not clear whether he’s genuinely lost his place, so poor are his performance skills.

He’s a musical comedian, too, with examples including a jaunty song about slacktivists – those Facebook users who think a ‘like’ is all it takes to cure the world’s ills – an idea that just took 15 words to explain concertinaed out over three uneventful minutes, even if the melody is nice. And his supposed parody of ‘independent-woman’ style R&B is an ear-assaulting dirge.

Then there are the rape jokes, too half-arsed to be offensive but certainly not funny, plus the scene which culminates in a drawing of a cock and balls spurting forth. That might sound childishly funny, but he does it with a peculiar lack of glee that robs it of any such impact.

Knox – a Raw Comedy finalists list year – seems to have put very little thought into any of this. For example, for the sake of a brief arty slideshow just before the show ends – with a blunt, but welcome, abruptness – he performs the whole show with a projection screen flashing ‘Sony DVD Player’ behind him. If he can’t be bothered to fix something as simple as that, what hope for the whole script?

There are one, maybe two, decent jokes, but the rest is a jumble of ill-conceived ideas performed with neither conviction nor charisma. This does not suggest the beginnings of a career that will stretch into 2013, let alone 2061.