Ben Chisholm: Voicebox
Note: This review is from 2007
Review by Steve Bennett
Ben Chisholm isn’t happy with his single-figure audience tonight. He was going to cancel the show, he tells us, before whining about how all the big-name comics at the festival drain comedy fans away from local acts such as himself.There’s no rage, and no comedy. It’s just a bloke having a whinge, the sort of conversation you can hear every night in the bar of the Festival Club.
And that’s pretty much endemic of his entire hour. It’s just a chat, nothing more, nothing less. Now it could be that he’s adopted this style because his disappointment the low turn-out has put him off doing his ‘real’ show – but with two reviewers in the scant audiene, it’s not the best policy.
Typically, he might ask us if we have trouble remembering names. He does, and sometimes he’ll be at parties and persist in calling someone by entirely the wrong name. I know! How crazy and funny is that!!
Well, without any amusing anecdote or punchline to go with it, not at all. You want to like the guy, but his comic input to all his stand-up routines is virtually nil, it’s just conversation.
The show has been sold on the back of his impressions, which he largely ignores. But he does a few. Imagine if Nicolas Cage was the Terminator. Image if Jerry Seinfeld was. And so on. Very occasionally an impression or a reference even comes from this century, too.
He moans, again, about other comics who say they can do voices because they do a passable Arnold Schwarzenegger. But then so does he. Oh, and a Sean Connery too.
When he asks for suggestions at the end, he declines a couple - even though he says of one ‘People always ask for that one…’, which might suggest he needs to prepare for it, before deciding it’s Eddie Murphy we really want to hear. To be fair, itt is a very good likeness, as are the rest – including a distinctive take-off of local comedian Dave Hughes.
But he does very little with this talent, just formulaic set-ups for the voices, surrounded by vast swathes of aimless conversation. He’s apologetic about the show afterwards, offering tickets to everyone to come back and see it again. But it’s hard to see why anyone would want to.
It’s not competition from big-name rivals Chisholm has to worry about, it’s his own act.
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Melbourne, April 2007
Review date: 1 Jan 2007
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
