Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

Why should the right-wing have the monopoly on asshole comedians? That’s the gap in the market that New Zealand’s Guy Williams is seeking to fill with his aggressive, goading comedy – and he throws himself into that mission wholeheartedly.

It’s a morally tricky path to tread which requires some daring from the comedian and plenty of trust from the audience that he won’t stumble. 

One of his core routines, for example, revolves around a familiar anti-woke complaint ‘why can’t I say the R-word any more?’ His argument is that this the best term to describe the intellectual capacities of the lunatic right and should be deployed to shame them. The logic might be a bit shaky, but still gives him enough latitude to play with the tension from flirting with the unacceptable language that the edgelords have.

Williams’s firehose of indignant outrage flows both ways. For all his political views are encapsulated in his show’s title, he knows the liberal left are hectoring and unlikeable and is happy to attack them for it. Not that ‘likeable’ is high on his own agenda as a comedian. He revels in being a wind-up merchant, provoking the Aussies at any opportunity, such as mocking the AFL for its niche sporting status outside of its strongholds. They might be tongue-in-cheek, but the comments are still designed to sting.

Skewering everything from the entirety of organised religion to Ed Sheeran, this is a fervent, ranty show, in which Williams sometimes lets his political anger get the better of him. There are some great lines about the state of the world and the destructive chaos of the right, but other routines peak with him simply yelling into the void in place of a punchline.

Though he hints at more thoughtful depths, Williams doesn’t have many gears  to his performance and deploys the same furious vigour to non-political subjects, even if they aren’t worth the energy he expends on them – that Adidas sells a shirt with ‘predator’ written across it, for example. On the other hand the fact that his supposedly everyman chunk about airport duty free shops fails to land becomes the gag itself.

The hour might be wild and unfocussed, but that’s also part of its appeal as a big angry man howls his disgust at whoever will listen.

• Guy Williams is on at The Westin at 9pm (8pm Sundays; no show Mondays) until April 19.

Review date: 7 Apr 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival