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 of Josh Thomas says that the reviewer has "been cheering on our baby faced, funnier than his years, Josh Thomas" since he first appeared in RAW comedy. His years, which don't seem to have been reviewed as yet, have obviously got some work to do. But to simply be dismissed like this, discarded by association, doesn't seem fair. How funny, precisely, have Josh Thomas's years been? I think we should be told. Were some more risible than others?

The reviewer's conclusion that Thomas's delivery is "gonna get real old real quick" because it's too cutesy brings to mind another comparison that involves a pot, the darkness of its hue, some name-calling, and a kettle. 2 stars.

This review of Frisky & Mannish's School of Pop attacks the show for not meeting that basic requirement of comedy: being funny. "This was not a comedy show", the reviewer says, describing it as "not vaguely funny", containing "no funny banter", saying "I only laughed 4 more times", and "I'm still wondering how this was funny". We are reminded later that "as I've said, these guys are no comedians". Critiquing something for not meeting the basic requirements of its own genre is entirely acceptable. For example: in addition to the liberal misuse of the comma in this review and the fact that the reviewer of a musical comedy show has never heard of many of the musical references, the review itself begins with the following sentence: "It's ironic that I try not to read the details of reviews for shows that I might consider seeing". No it isn't. No stars.

This review of Fear of a Brown Planet Returns states that an obvious fact about humour concerning race is that it is aimed at multicultural audiences. The reviewer then claims it was not aimed at him. This implies one of two things: (1) the reviewer exists in a cultural vacuum (2) he sees 'multicultural' as a category that excludes white people, in which case he is confusing the word multicultural with the word ethnic. He then describes the humour in the show as dividing the audience into unhelpful segments based on race. Part of me wonders if this review is satirical. 1 star. Just in case.

Most of Helen Razer's review of Sarah Bennetto's show is an analogy to do with comedians being like strippers. What this has to do with Sarah Bennetto's performance is this: it doesn't apply to her. To further demonstrate this point, we are given a list of things Sarah Bennetto does not do in her show. What does happen in Bennetto's show is unclear, although it is "nice", "refreshing", "self-deprecating" and "pleasant". Or it isn't. Razer finds that difficult to believe.

I found a fact about Sarah Bennetto's show in this review of Sarah Bennetto's show: there is a story in it that has something to do with the royal family. 1 star.