Lawrence Leung: Beginning Middle End
Live Review
Melbourne International Comedy Festival

You’d have to be pretty hard-hearted not to warm to the friendly charms of Lawrence Leung, possessor of possibly the most smiley face in Australian comedy, outside of Bob Downe. But it’s quite some leap to start imaging sexual fantasies in which he changes gender and has a child… with the Neighbours character Toadfish.

In the parallel world of online fan fiction, this is quite… well, ‘normal’ is the wrong word, but it happened – and certainly provides rich pickings for ‘television’s Lawrence Leung’. While many a comic gets mileage from reading vicious online criticisms, few get to know, and share, the intimate imaginings of their devotees. In either case, though, simply reading out the posts with incredulity gets the laughs, though in this case you suspect the outrage isn’t mock.

This story got him thinking into how, even in real incidents, we all find ourselves as supporting, or even starring, characters in other people’s anecdotes. And that’s his cue to regale some of those stories, mainly concerning his university crush, Millie, and their developing friendship.

Somehow that leads us to Colin Firth, the ‘male melancholic’ figure Millie, and so many other women, lust after. In the true spirit of the bullied geek, Leung disproves his supposed brooding charms via scientific analysis, bar charts and a slightly creepy experiment – all displayed on the obligatory PowerPoint slides.

As a former magician, Leung knows the power of presentation, and as such he’s made all these disparate strands hold together as a coherent hour, with a compelling story and a very neat video ending. Since the show is implicitly about storytelling, you would hope for little else.

But, as in most of Leung’s many escapades over the years, the driving force is not primarily the writing, but his determined puppy-dog enthusiasm, which waves infectiously through the crowd every time he holds his hands triumphantly aloft at some minor or accidental victory. He keeps the narrative at gushing pace and – save for one redundant and over-egged routine about helping his dad out with IT problems – tight and focussed.

As part of the tale, Leung hopes to demonstrate that he’s not the nice guy he’s always assumed to be. On that point he fails admirably, having delivered yet another amiable, feelgood hour of charismatic yarn-spinning.

But what we really want to know, is what happens next in the fanfiction story.