Review by Steve Bennett

Few comics put as much into their performance as Garrett Millerick, commanding the room with his loud, supercharged energy and extravagant oratory. Although it’s a small audience tonight, he never takes his foot off the gas.

But although he’s impressed before, this year’s show, unfortunately, seems like so much bombast, a victory of that domineering style over content, with routines quickly evaporating from memory.

There’s some social commentary, but it doesn’t quite cohere. He uses that declamatory style to suggest controversial viewpoints, which are then undermined as he doesn’t really believe them – but he doesn’t exploit the change of status either.

He claims, for example, that he doesn’t give a damn about recycling, which turns out to be a plea for less packaging, which seems reasonable. He blasts against the Irish for its marriage equality legislation… but only because he says he was pretending to be gay so his Irish family would stop bugging him about getting married. It doesn’t ring true, but neither is it silly enough to work on that basis.

Then there are easy targets like the NRA’s suggestion that the answer to America’s tragic epidemic of school shootings is to arm the teachers, or pointing out that the discourse on Facebook is no better than a toilet wall, or mocking estate agents for being reprehensible human detritus. Who knew? He describes these things eloquently, but superficially – there’s not enough extra value to inject them with interest.

Beyond the outward-looking routines, he paints himself as making something of a mess at life, drinking too much alone and describing moments when he’s ‘a bit of prick’, for example when encountering a rude barista. Yet again the stories don’t seem extreme enough to warrant the passion, so that over-dramatic performance continues to feel more like a prop than a tool.

I usually like Millerick’s style, but too much of this show felt hollow, however much sound and fury he puts into his rants.

Review date: 29 Aug 2015
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Underbelly Bristo Square