Melbourne Comedy Festival
Lower
Melbourne Town Hall, March 28 to April 20, 2003
Reviewer: Kate
Herbert
Daniel Kitson looks like
an unmade bed. He is an old doona with a messy haircut. If you like a
shambling, recalcitrant, young maverick, he's your guy.
Kitson makes a feast
of his own flaws. He has a stammer, a lisp, he's chubby and short, asthmatic
and myopic. It's a good bet he avoided
beatings by school bullies by being funny as all get out.
He also has, as he
describes it, a potty mouth. Kitson is not afraid to use words that are only allowed
on tele after 9pm. His presence and style
are initially disconcerting. He rarely looks directly at the audience from
behind his goggle-eyed spectacles.
He strolls about the
stage, head down, taking his time getting to the joke but all the time being
pretty damned funny.
He has a lazy manner
that allows him to lull us into complacency. Suddenly his sharp mind, quick wit
and obvious intellect and education leap at us. He slips literary and
political references in under out guard.
Much of his material
is based around his droll Northern English family. More particularly he focuses
on his grandmother who died recently. She was rude, short,
fat and unbridled. Even her funeral was funny. Kitson jokes about his Downes Syndrome aunt, feisty uncle
and dry-witted dad.
His self-deprecation
is intrinsic to his appeal. He hits his sensitive spots before we can. Echoes
of the school ground and bully avoidance again. He challenges his own
views on love and his fantasies about romance. He has not found his perfect
partner because he's too bloody picky - or she's hiding in a bomb shelter being
anti-social.
He talks a lot about
sex and makes all the men in the audience nervous by talking about occasional impotence. His references to
the armed forces are frequent. One whole routine is
based around a belligerent audience member - a drunken young soldier who took a
dislike to Kitson's criticism of the army.
You need to be resilient
to be a comic. Kitson, despite his nerdy appearance, is a potent character with
a strange blend of filth and intellect.
By Kate Herbert
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