Melbourne comedy festival review by Steve Bennett

Bridget Everett is what you get if you leave a normal flirtatious nightclub singer too close to a radioactive core. She’s a Godzilla of cabaret, a voracious, debauched chardonnay-chugging maneater, wreaking chaos as she stomps through her world, driven by base emotion and toying with feeble humans before destroying them with the might of her superpowers: her ample titties and her avaricious pussy.

Big, brash and in-your-face – sometimes quite literally – she is sexual force of nature, more intoxicated than intoxicating. Her grace and decorum might come from the trailer park, but she’s a woman who grabs what she wants. And what she wants might be you, if you’re sitting in the wrong place.

With a wardrobe designed to malfunction barely hanging off her all-woman frame, she prowls through the half-terrified crowd in eager search of her next prey, or preys. There are laughs of nervous relief from neighbours, delighted not to be in her inescapable clutches, and howls of mock-outrage from elsewhere.

Pound It is empowering, not so much for Everett’s unabashed sexual liberation, but because of a sloppy woman having the confidence to invite laughs at her body on her own terms, as so many dick-baring male comics have done before. The adoptive New Yorker, who’s appeared in Inside Amy Schumer and Trainwreck, uses her fine cabaret voice to sing high praise to her breasts and her genitals, amusing in their lyrics, in their brashness, in their absurd irony – take your pick.

Shock value clearly plays a huge role, and her behaviour manages to get increasingly more disgraceful as the hour progresses. But the humour can be a bit one-note, even if it is admittedly a very loud note. Her persona could certainly be, erm, fleshed out more. 

As it is, there is a shockingly funny section about her serial abortions, but more stories how this sexually rapacious hot mess might function in the real world,or more about her origin stories, would add welcome layers to the experience.

But, my, is it an experience: an intense, ribald hour of over-sexed salaciousness, and sights you will never ever be able to unsee. And that’s even if you’re not picked out of the crowd for special, possibly traumatic, attention.

• Bridgett Everett has now completed her Melbourne run, but has dates in Joe’s Pub in New York in April and May, the Bonnaroo Music festival in Tennessee in June, and London’s Soho Theatre in July.

Review date: 5 Apr 2016
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett