Review by Steve Bennett

This doesn’t sound like the most edifying of prospects, a female comic talking about her ‘itchy clacker’ for 60 minutes. But while Tammy Anderson certainly doesn’t shirk from heading below the belt, she speaks with such honesty, warmth and animated verve that transcend expectations of mere filth to create an engaging and hilarious hour of storytelling.

Anderson is a Tasmanian aboriginal – although she clearly embraces white Aussie values too, as the slang title demonstrates (‘clacker’, for those unfamiliar with the Strine argot, is round the back, rather than the front). This hour is as much about the characters she encounters in her shitty, poverty-ridden backwater as it is with her comic obsession with bodily functions and cavities, and in this it has all the makings of a grimly bizarre sitcom – even if the genuine collection of oddballs who comprise her friends and neighbours would surely be dismissed as too surreal for fiction.

She begins, as advertised, in the nether regions: talking of her son’s potty training, her visits to the gynaecolgist and a certain amount of prenatal discharge. Lovely.

She does this not with the relaxed bonhomie usually associated with stand-up, but with a slightly theatrical monologue. She doesn’t pretend to be a chum talking Off the Top of her head, abandoning that artifice for what is clearly prepared material. The upshot of this, however, is that every deliberate gesture, every subtle expression, every dynamic mime, is pitch-perfect. The honesty comes in the writing, which is then perfectly illustrated by her skilful, likeable performance.

Sure, she can’t entirely resist the temptation to put in a few gratuitous shock-value lines, but the fact she’s telling genuine stories means she earns herself a lot of slack.

Her ‘itchy clacker’ is caused by living among families too penny-conscious to afford toilet paper, instead resorting to pages from the A-K section of the telephone directory. This gives her reason to move on from the scatological to talk about the freaks, drunks, loose women, absent fathers and virtual mutants who inhabit her neighbourhood; a weird, isolated netherworld that David Lynch fans would surely recognise.

This is all the stronger for the fact Anderson can’t rely on ‘euugh’ tactics for laughs. Instead she paints the most vivid portraits of this ragtag collection of oddballs, then brings them to life with expertly-told anecdotes. She makes the incredible, credible – and does so with a rare skill.

Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Melbourne, April 2007

Review date: 1 Jan 2007
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett