Melbourne comedy festival review by Steve Bennett

Crowd-pleaser is the best way to describe Simon Taylor, a comic with an energetic delivery but material that errs on the side of caution, sometimes even old hat – before he relaxes into a longer first-hand anecdote which demonstrates some nifty storytelling skills.

At the very start, though, some things grate, especially his ironic/not ironic swagger that’s dangerously close to real arrogance. He complains about his lack of audience – despite the 100-seat room being a perfectly respectable two-thirds full, yet there are much better comedians with much smaller crowds across this festival. And the mid-level magic trick given the hard sell added to the smug tone.

Such preamble dispensed with, the first half of Human seems very much like a near bulletproof club set. There’s often not much to it: doing regional accents, playing off cities against rural towns, noticing Aussies’ tendency to shorten their country to ’Stralia while lengthening names to Steveo, mimicking an asthmatic car starting up… These are dependable comic staples all, but he transports them with a slick, upbeat performance that delivers the laughs.

Typical is a chunk when he describes his rave dancing as ‘big box, small box’ as if he’d invented the term. But that’s what *everyone* called it at the time (or rather ‘little fish, big fish, cardboard box’), and his audience look old enough to know that. But his exaggerated comic reconstruction of the moves easily entertains.

A Disney song corrupted to cover Alpha Males – and him not being one – bridges the show into its more satisfying second half, when he tells of a strange overnight stopover in one of those aforementioned country towns. Here many of the stereotypes he set up in the first half are more subtly deployed in a hipster-out-of-water tale of a nightclub brawler and possible one-night stand. The writing’s vivid and he displays a vulnerability not obvious from his earlier, showman demeanour.

Taylor seems to be straddling the line between easy mainstream laughs and a more artistic festival approach, unsure where to jump – not that the audience he had eating out of his hand would care about such things.

Review date: 4 Apr 2016
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett