Review by Steve Bennett

Though his fame hasn’t travelled, Dave Hughes is one of Australia’s best-known comics; a regular on a couple of national TV programmes and host of Melbourne’s top-rated breakfast radio show. Everyone coming to his sold-out festival run already knows what a funny man he is – and they’re not going to let a little thing like lack of even half-way decent material get in the way of them having a good time.

For someone previously unaware of the charms of the inevitably nicknamed ‘Hughesy’, it’s a bizarre experience to see the lamest of throwaway lines greeted as if they were pearls of inspired wit. This is what celebrity brings – you don’t even have to try to be good any more.

His sort of amiable but vacuous banter is perfect for the radio, with such vast amounts of airtime to fill every day, but it seems pretty weak for a $32-a-head show. There are comics here who’ve spent weeks, if not months, crafting each line to be the best it can be, then there’s this bloke who’s written down the first things he’s thought of storming a 1,000-seat theatre.

And a bloke is what Hughes most definitely is, with his Aussieness dial turned up to 11. If he said ‘Good on yeeeew’ once, he said it a hundred times. And every whiney nasal vowel is not just strangulated, but cut up into tiny pieces and dumped in the Yarra river in bin bags.

Yet for all that everyman stance, much of the material in Tasty, his tenth solo festival show, seems alienating. Telling of how he likes being famous, how he got a free car after doing a series of adverts for the manufacturer, how he was at the corporate hospitality tent at the grand prix having photos taken with models. Stuff I’m sure we can relate to - but it seems not to matter.

For all that’s wrong with this show, and there is plenty, there are moments when whatever it is that catapulted him to fame break through. He does serve up one or two accurate and funny observational routines about everyday life - supermarket carrier bags or water-efficient showers – and a fine anecdote about how marketing morons messed up one of his gags in an advertising campaign has a little bite.

But for every one of these, there’s 15 minutes of dross like elevating the old ‘yeah – and I fucked your mum’ heckle put-down into a full-blown story or taking easy pot-shots at Australian Idol contestants.

Tasty is essentially a plastic, bland, unsatisfying experience. How apt, then, that the show’s logo has been designed to look like a Big Mac…

Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Melbourne, April 2005

Review date: 1 Jan 2005
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett