Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

Brace yourself for this shockingly original thought, but Chris Parker thinks that relentlessly scrolling through your phone from morning to night is maybe not a good thing.

Yet he can’t ignore the hypocrisy of that since it’s the millions of social media likes that have filled his festival venue with adoring fans, people who love him just for dancing on the stage as we file in.

It’s typical of his exuberant camp energy that makes the gig fun… at least for a bit. While his upbeat energy is infectious, the fact that every emotion and comment is turned up to maximum – along with the relentless Valley girl-style inflections – becomes draining. Especially as too many times a rising note of incredulity stands in for a proper punchline.

Saying something like ‘Four years and no train!’ in his excitable way, for example, is enough to get a laugh for that simple statement of fact about work on Melbourne’s Metro Tunnel Project. But with many of his observations being fairly routine, from Facebook being full of people posting pictures of their dinners to ADHD being a must-have disorder among people who want to seem interesting, they need all the help they can get.

Linked to the idea of toxic phone use is the other key strand, FOMO. He’s blighted by it, yelping out his insecurities that there may be a WhatsApp group out there somewhere talking about him behind his back. 

Otherwise, the Kiwi comic always wants to be the centre of attention, as his ‘look at me’ stage presence attests. He becomes grouchy when friends chose his birthday to have their wedding – but feeling overshadowed by that seems petty at 33. That’s the joke, but he also seems genuinely put out. 

Maybe he’s a late developer socially, as well as in his sex life, as he reveals here that he came out as gay relatively late. Even now his portrayal of gay life as all shopping, clubbing, brunch and glitter seems reductive, though we should never deny him his truth. Still, he confesses – as if he needed to – that he’s terrible at being butch, before entertainingly parodying banter between straight bros.

While unconvincingly protesting that he’s ‘so embarrassed’ to be retelling many of his stories, his no-filter approach is to his credit, especially when he shares his vulnerability, such as explaining how he finds it hard to make friends as all the potential candidates smell his desperation.

Putting his life under the microscope is more interesting than the obvious observations and broad stereotypes that he so often reverts to, and there are several good routines and standalone gags over the hour if you can pick them out from the noise. And more variety in the delivery pitch wouldn’t go amiss, either.

But in the small chunks social media demands, the constancy is an asset, and given this show ends with him road-testing some possible ideas for future TikToks, he’s probably not quite ready to give up social media just yet.

Review date: 8 Apr 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival