Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

‘Is David Correos maturing?’ might not seem like the most obvious question to ask of a man who spends some of his show dressed as a traffic cone. But while the Kiwi comedian has a reputation for outrageous stunts, Touching My Active Mind leans more towards playfulness than unsettling intensity. 

It could be a consequence of his Taskmaster NZ fame, but his audience are on board from the very beginning as he delivers cheery blasphemy while pretending to be a man of God. 

This sets in motion a demented ride of daft prop comedy, cacophonous sound cues, ridiculous costume changes and snippets of stand-up, some of it meta as he breaks down the mechanics of a bit before he does that bit. There are some callbacks, but that’s as far as he goes in terms of structure. 

Instead, Touching My Active Mind is a grab-bag of fatuous madness, powered by the comic’s unbridled enthusiasm for just having a laugh, however dumb. He affects being tongue-in-cheek when he promises to ‘work you into a frenzy’, but his passion for being loud and stupid will wear down most resistance. 

Leaping from one set piece to another with no higher purpose means the hour is almost guaranteed to be hit-and-miss. His looseness is such a trademark, he’s even happy to let it undermine material. For example, an early gag with a  missing microphone (a chunk that wasn’t really worth the payoff)  makes it hard to hear the lyrics to a rap he yells over the loud music. 

Still it feeds into Correos’s almost reckless desire to surprise and entertain, driven by his frenetic, trickster’s energy. The crowd endorse it, encourage it, and even become complicit in it when he recruits us all for a prank. By this point we’ve all become recruits to his sect of lunacy.

• David Correos: Touching My Active Mind is on at The Greek at 8.50pm (7.50pm Sundays; no show Mondays) until April 19.

Review date: 6 Apr 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett