Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

You don’t expect a seasoned comic to be reading from notes halfway through their festival run, but David Quirk has good reason.

He had planned to do a show about his home town of Porepunkah in country Victoria, after Dezi Freeman shot and killed two policemen and injured another while they were investigating historical sexual abuse claims there last August.

Not the most obvious premise for a comedy show, but it prompted Quirk to reminisce about his upbringing and wonder how the town had dealt with the impact of the crime. However last-minute rewriting was required when, after seven months on the run,  Freeman himself was fatally shot on March 30, the first Monday of the comedy festival.

Quirk has a few comments about needing to rewrite the show – and how the media’s reporting of him having to do so sat uncomfortably alongside sombre reporting of the serious crimes. 

In truth, it’s hard to see quite how much rewriting would have been required in the wake of Freeman’s death, as the bulk of Quirk’s show – for which he doesn’t need notes – is about creating an image of this small town and the people in it.

He starts this part of the show with his strongest routine, questioning the internal logic of toilet-stall graffiti – forensically dissecting the stupid sexual imagery – before regaling the audience with stories of winding up doing building work for a bloke nicknamed ‘Mad Rooter’. For all the sophistication of the comedy world Quirk belongs to in urbane Melbourne, the height of humour in Porepunkah seems to be making wanking signs at each other. 

Without saying as much, he’s rather affectionate for this simpler state of affairs, and the portrait of his hometown is affectionate – even though one of his favoured comedy technique is to build a story with sensitivity only to destroy it with a punchline.

But however engaging a storyteller Quirk is, this show doesn’t really get to the roots of the place – and certainly not the impact of the Freeman case on the community. That superficiality and a lack of clarity about what Quirk is trying to ultimately convey means this falls short of his usual high standard. And that’s one thing that can’t be pinned on Dezi Freeman.

Review date: 15 Apr 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival