Joel Creasey
5 April 2015
ACMI
to 19 April
comedyfestival.com.au
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| Joel Creseay |
Each year I try and see one of the big-venue, they're-on-the-telly shows. I liked Joel Creasey on I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here (go ahead, judge me – I loved it) and was curious to see how he’d turn his burst of popular fame and the fiction of reality television into a festival show.
Hurricane is just a name to justify the festival-standard snore about having to name his show before he wrote it. And the room laughed at the joke and at the snarky twink character telling it.
Telly fame lets you play to 300-seat rooms when you're 24; rooms filled with people who wet themselves at the mention of Mad Maureen McCormick. Yes, he talks about being in the jungle and I don’t think there was anyone there who hadn’t seen I’m a Celebrity.
And they went nuts for the a bit about middle-aged ugly male comedians who perform in suburban pubs and make non-PC jokes. Jokes about gay sex (you can get poo on your dick), about gay clubs (Poof Doof, what a funny name) and fatties (no one likes ugly people), with bonus casual misogyny of lesbian jokes (they build the podium the gay boys dance on).
But these are Joel’s jokes.
Sure, comedy is subjective, but – laugh or not – it comes down to "who are we laughing at?" and "what's the common or shared expereince". This audience were laughing at the performer, they weren't laughing with him. The laughs may sound the same, but when you’re sitting among them, they feel horrible and nothing like the supportive of tribal recognition. And the shared experience between him and his audience? Laughing at gays, lesbians, nutters and fatties.
This was also discussed on AussieTheatre.com.
