The Reviewer Reviewer

This review runs for three lines and awards the performer one star. It claims the performer is not part of the extraordinary talent pool of the festival and suggests that readers of the widely circulated newspaper The Herald Sun “don’t bother with this one”. By way of analysis of the performer’s work, the reviewer imitates the performer (“Parweeee-sian Fwank”) and jokes about the unlikely possibility that “wedging Ws into as many words as possible is the new funny”.

And that’s the end of the review. We don’t know what the show aimed to do. We don’t know what it was supposed to be about. We know the reviewer didn’t like it and we know it annoyed her sufficiently to elicit schoolyard sarcasm and mimicry and to tell people not to bother turning up on the basis of these remarks alone. This demonstrates a great deal of disrespect for the performer and to comedy performance generally – imagine if a Melbourne International Arts Festival show was mocked and dismissed out of hand in three lines without analysis – but the greatest disservice here is perhaps to the reader. We read reviews in order to get a sense of a show, whether we would enjoy it, and whether it was successful in what it was attempting to do. This review gives another sense entirely: that lazy reviews written on the back of napkins are the new clever. No stars.

This review of Jen Brister’s show [review since edited, original text below] claims that “very few female comedians can pull off funny funny”.

“Funny”, according to the dictionary, means amusing. So does “funny”.

“Funny funny”, one presumes, means amusing twice. Perhaps there should be a notification on the comedy festival’s website to specify for the sell-out audiences attending Tig Notaro, Maria Bamford and Geraldine Quinn’s shows, for example, exactly which one night during the festival is going to be the funny one.

This linguistic device has been used again later in the review to describe where the audience is “from from”. Is the reviewer writing a lullaby?

Of course, the reviewer probably means “just plain funny on an objective level that exists above the level of female comedy”. Not only is this patently untrue, deeply ignorant and sexist, but it’s a generalisation that entirely explodes the reviewer’s integrity as an analytical writer. We are told it is surprising that the act is humorous (why?) and that very few women comedians are funny funny (what does that mean? According to whom? What women? Are there statistics? Pie charts?). While these questions remain unanswered, considerable space is dedicated to the performer herself: we know about her race, her gender, her sexuality, her outlandish behaviour, the colour of her skin, and the fact that she is a Londoner. This preoccupation with the appearance of a woman being reviewed for her comedy is particularly interesting in the context of the above generalisations and misapprehensions.

If I were to judge this review on the basis not of its content but its presentation – and if I were then to extend that judgement to an entire class of persons about whose work I knew not a great deal – I might conclude that very few reviewers can “write write”. No stars.

TEXT OF ORIGINAL ARTICLE:

JEN Brister is one crazy half Spanish, half British lesbian. And I say that in the most endearing way possible.
Very few female comedians can pull off funny funny, but Jen Brister’s outlandish on-stage behaviour and somewhat unsophisticated delivery make for, surprisingly, quite a humorous act.
The browner-than-most-Brits Brister is from South London, which is apparently a far from sufficient answer to explaining her olive skin. However, before you ask where she is, you know, from from; the answer will still be South London. And if you have the gumption to ask where is from from from, brace yourself for a anatomical image.
It’s always fun and games with accents until someone makes a sex joke. Or at least, that’s how it went at Jen’s childhood birthday parties.
Having a mother with a Spanish accent as strong as the day she arrived is fine – until she offers the kids at the party some coke. Coca Cola, that is. If you’ve ever talked to a Mediterranean European, you’ll know "coke" isn’t part of their vocabulary. I lie. It is, only they were never taught an "e" on the end of a word makes the vowel say its name.
Don’t worry, the show isn’t just gutter jokes. Brister also covers Julia Gillard’s terrible accent, accepts responsibility on behalf of the British for the Stolen Generation, explains why she hates pornography and how the general public don’t understand lesbian sex.
She also throws in, just for good measure, a visual demonstration of why the British Empire collapsed.
Squirm in your seat worthy at times, but overall – a jolly good

This year's reviews of Melbourne International Comedy Festival shows have generally been of a much higher standard than usual.

This review of Eddie Ifft's show, however, is made up almost entirely of cheese-based metaphors. There doesn't appear to be a reason for this. The show isn't about cheese and the comedian's name isn't Gouda or Halloumi or Cheddar, so it seems the only reason the reviewer invokes cheese metaphors is so that she can refer to the show as 'putrid', to the content of the show as 'tainted', to the comedian as 'colossally rotten', and - somewhat bizarrely - so that she can threaten to notify the cheese police about a suspicious 'import'.

There is some analysis of the show's politics and of Ifft's ability to make his audience laugh buried between the allusions, but the furious rotten cheese theme is so central to the critical narrative that one would be forgiven for writing off this review as too angry, too obsessed with its own mode of delivery, and not interested enough in teasing out the concerns the reviewer had with the actual show.

I'm also taking off one star for "unleavened by the milk of human kindness". As a general rule, when even cheese metaphors are drifting off topic and encroaching on the milk metaphor genre I fear we are in danger of losing focus altogether.

Two stars.

This is a list of Top Ten Possible Conclusions To Be Drawn From This List of Top Ten Hits at the 2011 Melbourne International Comedy Festival:

1. This is a comprehensive list of the ten hit shows in the upcoming Melbourne International Comedy Festival. 

2. This is a list of the reviewer's favourite acts from previous festivals. 

3. There are no women in the world.  

4. There are, but this reviewer has never seen any of them perform. 

5. He has, but he didn't like them enough to put them in the top ten list of hits of the upcoming festival.

6. Maria Bamford, Tig Notaro, Claudia O'Doherty, Kitty Flanagan and Fiona O'Loughlin are not appearing at the festival.

7. The comedy festival hasn't happened yet so women’s shows cannot be assessed anyway.

8. In which case…

9. This list is a list of what one reviewer thinks might be a hit in something that doesn't exist yet.

10. These top ten lists really are excellent aren't they.

In this review of Weird Al Yankovic’s show at the Palais in St Kilda, the reviewer accuses the performer of operating at a fourth-grade level. In the previous sentence the performer is referred to as retarded. In a review of his work. In a newspaper.

It is then suggested that the word ‘retarded’ would be a fitting description of Yankovic if the playground connotations of the word didn’t exist. They do. That is why the word was used in the first place. They especially do in an article that begins with playground metaphors and in a sentence designed to be an insult. 

The review goes on to say that nobody in the adoring crowd failed to notice that Weird Al and his perfunctory session musicians were devoid of genius. This of course begs the question: if nobody failed to notice how ordinary it was, what was the adoring crowd adoring? Was it the lack of genius of which they were so fond?

Very unclear. A bit retarded*. No stars.

*no actual meaning intended.

This review in today's Age is of a circus show. I know this because the word CIRCUS is written just above the one and a half stars the reviewer has awarded to the show. The show is performed by Skye Gellmann and Naomi Francis. I know this because their names are written beneath the one and a half stars the reviewer has awarded to the show.

The review itself tells us that the performers hyperventilate and break things. For some reason this engenders a response in the reviewer that touches on cling-film, pupae, colonoscopies, panic, Stan Brakhage, pretentious cinema, and Nepalese toilets.

In other words, one thing is clear: the reviewer did not enjoy the show. Nothing about the rest of the review, except maybe the font, is clear, constructive, informative, or helpful. No stars.

Australian TV awards show The Logies was hosted this year by television performer Bert Newton. Consensus in the press is that he did very well, The Daily Telegraph reviewing his performance as follows: "Less viewers but everyone still loves Bert". Unfortunately for The Daily Telegraph, unless the viewers in question comprise a single entity (not an entirely ludicrous suggestion. The Logies broadcast was out-rated by a cooking program) this is an embarrassing grammatical error. 

 The Herald Sun reviewed Newton's performance as short, sharp, smart and dangerous, although the reviewer seemed surprised that Newton hadn't mentioned his son's treatment in a rehab clinic in his opening monologue (honestly. I promise I'm not kidding). A few of Bert's choice lines are then printed. He "took aim at disgraced footballer Brendan Fevola and former Victorian police chief Christine Nixon" for example.  

This morning there has been a large fuss in the same newspapers wherein this very skill - comedians taking pot-shots at easy targets regardless of whether it hurts their feelings - is receiving stern disapproval. 'NASTY LOGIE TWEETS', 'COMEDIAN WIL ANDERSON WAS AT IT AGAIN', 'CATHERINE DEVENY'S CONTROVERSIAL LOGIES NIGHT TWITTER REMARKS' they say. A TV Week spokeswoman is quoted saying, "In this time of modern technology we ask people to respect the event and the evening".

Reviewers are entitled to think that unfunny personal attacks are snide and self-aggrandizing but if they're congratulating Bert for doing this for four hours, they have a logic problem. Those reviewers critiquing tweets had better be the ones critiquing network TV like The Footy Show, Hey Hey It's Saturday and Bert Newton's kick-em-while-they're-down Logies jokes for taking the same approach. Otherwise, it might seem less like a critique and more like an attempt to start a food fight in a school canteen.

No stars, Logies reviewers. No stars.

This review of Moby Dick is an excellent example of two major trends in contemporary reviewing.

1. If a review begins with a description of the hilarious/profound/life-changingly enjoyable time the audience was having on the evening the reviewer attended, chances are the reviewer didn't like it.

 2. Wherever possible, at whatever cost to the integrity of the finer points of the reviewer's critique, puns on the show's title or central themes or indeed anything at all should be deployed more often than, say, verbs.

 To ensure a positive review then, it's generally a good idea to make sure the title of your show brings to mind a metaphor of some kind that reflects positively on the production (no mention of sinking ships or being lost at sea for example) and that your audience - whatever else they might do - for heaven's sake not enjoy themselves. 3 stars.

In his televised review of the film Kick Ass, Richard Wilkins describes the film as “inappropriate”, “wrong” and “so wrong”. These three clearly distinct and well-reasoned objections seem to be based on the film's imagined influence on ‘youngsters’. His central concerns are the violence and the use of "extreme" language. Wilkins describes the violence as follows: "I just think it desensitises the whole guns and kids and stuff like that". Extreme language that has the potential to negatively influence young people's ability to communicate in the real world: indeed. 1 star.