Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

Forget all the empowering messages that surround us about personal growth, Jess Fuchs doesn’t believe any of it is possible.

She comes across as wilfully shallow, but in a wonderfully scathing way. At her finest, she can unleash a flurry of withering, impudent gags worthy of Joan Rivers.

Her ‘woo-woo’ friend and her search for alternative routes to self-improvement is a particular figure of fun. Meanwhile, Fuchs’s actual therapist has told her to try to chill more – although there’s little evidence she’s taken that advice in her breathless, irrepressible delivery.

That’s deployed on a story about an ill-fated trip to Cobh in County Cork, the small town that was the final port of call for RMS Titanic – a fact they certainly milk there. The trip was almost the last port of call for Fuchs, too, thanks to a very painful accident, graphically described.

The 32-year-old makes a play of being dumb, making no attempt to pronounce Irish names, for example – but then she does have dyslexia that caused her to struggle at school.  In fact, her smarts are just pointed in a different direction to most people’s, allowing her to find loopholes in prayers or dissect phrases such as ‘plenty more fish in the sea’ with an eccentric logic.

Such stand-up routines are weaved in effortlessly with her storytelling, and a few more personal reflections – without, of course, ever suggesting she needs or wants to change. She’s on a path and is going to stick to it.

Her cocky, boisterous delivery gets the audience on board quickly and holds them there – we’ll even go along with the ambitious Titanic analogy relating to her injury because we’ve bonded with her zero-fucks-given energy that really makes her unsinkable.  

• Jess Fuchs: Feral is on at Bard's Apothecary at 9.15pm until Saturday.

Review date: 16 Apr 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival