Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

As the new wave of Nazis becomes ever more visible, Reuben Kaye provides the counterpoint. He’s the Weimar cabaret for the Heated Rivalry generation, delivering passionate political satire with all the decadent, queer and outrageously horny trappings you could hope for.

It’s a parallel he invokes by calling Melania Trump a ‘Temu Eva Braun’ and bringing up Ernst Röhm, the gay leader of Adolf Hitler’s brownshirts, as a warning to modern-day quislings cheerleading for a US President who will one day turn on them. This idea is conveyed in a glorious, toe-tapping, polka-infused number.

For Kaye’s rancorous hatred of the right is wrapped up in his fabulous showmanship. There is no performer in the festival with more presence, no show with more pizzazz – as established with a blistering opening number, performed with full glittery magnificence.

It requires a costume change to slip into something marginally more Comfortable to deliver the rest of the show. An assistant comes out to aid with the change as Kaye keeps talking, as if he were a Formula One car doing a pit stop – and he’s got just as much horsepower under his bonnet.

Some of his political and topical material will have a familiar feel given how easy it is to mock  the Trumps, the Pauline Hansons, the Elon Musks and the ‘pray-the-gay-away’ evangelists of the world, but if he’s preaching to the choir, it’s greeted with a hearty ‘Hallelujah’ as he does it in such style.  

While he sometimes slips into soapboxing, leaving his tight seven-piece band to sit passively and watch, he has the magnetism to hold any room. And despite being clearly on the side of the woke, he can surprise because he’s also driven by a higher desire: to be cutting. So he greets the male loneliness epidemic  with spiky sarcasm, for example, even if he pins his hopes on straight men to step up to the plate and defeat the right.

This year, Kaye also draws on his Jewish cultural identity more than ever with a thoughtful story about being treated by a Palestinian medic in a Jewish hospital in Berlin – and all the baggage that sentence carries – that breaks up the razzmatazz.

But we’re rarely too far from another barnstorming cabaret number, belted out with all the force of the musical theatre star he is, sometimes while prowling the auditorium like an apex predator seeking prey.

Kaye concludes by suggesting that Australians’ inherent desire not taking themselves too seriously will be enough to stop extremism taking a hold – which does seem a little complacent given neo-Nazis have taken to the streets and the One Nation party are polling around 25 per cent.  

But with a charismatic force of nature like Kaye rallying the troops, he instils a hope that tolerance, openness and colourful celebration will prevail over the nasty, the small-minded and the miserable.

Review date: 19 Apr 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival