Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

A primary school teacher by day, Courtney Smith is a lively, agreeable presence full of the positivity and playfulness her job demands. It’s a personality that makes palatable some of the darker parts of her back story, even if there’s a mismatch between tone and content.

Though she’s faced challenges in her life, she rejects the suggestion she’s a brave Aussie battler. It’s not quite clear why she bristles at the suggestion she’s indefatigable in the face of adversity – as all the evidence suggests – yet she does.

Instead, her preferred description for herself is a chatterer, prone to striking up conversation, however inane, in the supermarket queue, just to break the tension.

That same garrulousness defines her debut comedy hour. Smith talks a lot, but as a very new act hasn’t yet got the focus or editing skills to hone her stories down to the crucial, and funniest bits. 

Her strongest material is up front, as she compares herself unflatteringly to her partner, a leading women’s cancer surgeon, while contrasting her lifesaving medical work with the mundane domesticity that comes into any relationship. In a winning linguistic flourish, Smith always describes herself as a ‘teacher (just primary)’.

The transition to darker content about her father being abusive to her mother is a difficult gear change, while the stories in which she protests against the ‘battler’ label are engaging, if not especially funny. However, they do paint a vivid picture of how tough it is trying to get by in life as a working-class single parent with no safety net, forever feeling she’s one stroke of fate away from being homeless or in prison.

She throws in music (via a parody of Chicago’s Cell Block Tango), sketch (a Handmaid’s Tale skit) and gameplay into the energetic mix, yet it never quite gels. The gap between someone who’d liven your day with a random chat in the street to comedian with practised punchlines that land seems wide at the moment. But it’s nothing a determined battler couldn’t overcome. 

• Courtney Smith: curlycourtney@bigpond.com is on at the Chinese Museum at 7.50pm (6.50pm Sundays; no show Mondays) until April 19.

Review date: 2 Apr 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival