Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

It’s a Monday night in one of the comedy festival’s less glamorous rooms, but Sam Garlepp bursts out with a cheesy-but-cheery Hamilton parody song and sparks the venue into life with his good-natured energy. This feels like it’s going to be an entertaining hour.

But those high hopes ebb away the longer he’s on stage. He’s got charisma. He’s got verve. He’s got an easy rapport with the audience. He’s got… very little material. 

That his delivery’s so strong means it takes a while to notice. He can make almost anything sound like a joke, the sturdy rhythms emphasised by his easy, unaffected laugh at his own content. But what he’s actually saying so often amounts to very little.

He talks about him getting up the moment his alarm goes off, but his girlfriend needs several snoozes. About how midweek weddings are a pain because you have to take days off. And doesn’t picking a streaming show to watch together take a long time? Too often it feels like he’s just telling us stuff in a pleasingly cheery way, but overlooking the requirement to punch it up with gags or exaggeration. It’s all a bit ‘morning radio DJ’.

There are some decent set-ups, especially self-effacing routines from his childhood, including a bizarre birthday surprise his mother arranged for him, and the entirely impractical way his sister transformed their backyard for her wedding. But once he’s established these scenarios, he finds himself with no place to go. Quite a few routines end with him chuckling, ‘all right, we’ll just move on’, as the half-formed ideas splutter out. 

There’s a clunky linking device about Spotify Wrapped, which he uses to replay the clip about Prince Harry’s frostbitten todger from the Spare audiobook as a running gag, awkwardly shoehorned in every time he deploys it.

Stronger is a routine about wedding celebrants, in which he ventures an opinion then acts it out, while the note to his older self contains a more stylish callback. The small number of songs he does are highlights, too, making good use of his undeniable showbizzy performance skills. 

Garlepp is, after all, hugely engaging, but he’s spreading himself thin with this show.

• Sam Garlepp: Sam Sam But Different is on at Campari House at 7pm until Sunday.

Review date: 4 Apr 2023
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival