Review by Steve Bennett

Strange girl, this Melinda Buttle... But thankfully she’s got an outlet for her weirdness, which she seizes with relish.

So often, it can seem as if a comedian’s got into stand-up as a career move en route to a lucrative presenting job, or because it’s a seemingly cool thing to do. But after hearing an hour jam-packed with Buttle’s tales of decidedly screwed-up childhood, you understand that she probably HAD to be a comic, to make sense of so many young traumas and adult awkwardness.

Her divorced parents were so often absent, which explains the need for the validation of strangers, while she was humiliated so often by their odd ideas about life and child-rearing – not to mention the nerdy, outsider status which that cultivated – that she is now so immune from embarrassment. She can be perfectly frank in the therapy-room of a comedy stage, without any consideration of how it might affect her image. Contradictory as it might sound, that honesty and awareness of her own place as a misfit, makes her in some sense more balanced than those pretending to be what they’re not.

Not that ‘balanced’ would be the first adjective to spring to mind as she details her peculiarly sad and lonely back story: how as a four-year-old raised by a ‘day-care mum’ she preferred the company of the middle-aged than her peers; how her impatient dad tried and failed to cure her of a snake phobia so intense she’s even scared if her own arm assumes the shape to this day; the date with the boy whose mouth was a dental holocaust (which perhaps explains why she remained a virgin into her late 20s); and her unrequited love, as detailed in her teenage diary.

Away from the stage, she could be a cat-loving, Golden Girls obsessive, borderline shut-in, lamenting her repeated failure to get into drama school. But on it, she owns her unease, detailing it all with vulnerable, self-effacing sarcasm at a cracking, energetic pace, including mini-dialogues with herself to underline that lack of cool. She grabs the attention and keeps the anecdotes coming thick and fast.

There are some easy targets, mocking faddish gluten-free diets, cheap reality television, or the precious chi-chiness of the Northcote middle classes – and sometimes she goes for a cheap crudeness – but when she looks inward, the astuteness leads to a rich seam of self-deprecation.

Her stories have also been moulded to a structure, wrapped up with her chaste porn scene, which she acts out with a game audience member, shedding more light on her nerdy dreams and ambitions.

Review date: 11 Apr 2013
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival