By John Gibson. Venue 88: Just the Tonic @ The Caves

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This is a longer show with an interval, so the bill can afford to have some newer performers and these take the form of a bearded Estonian and Takashi Wakasugi (a sweet Japanese guy) with one joke about a misheard conversation.  The fact that he gets any laughs at all shows that he has funny bones, but the joke didn’t work linguistically or socially.  In fact, I wonder if AI was involved in the creation of this world salad.

The opener was Scott Bennett who was by far the most confident performer on the night.  His material, though mostly domestic, resonated well with the parents and he nailed every gag with a pleasing cadence and tone. Thankfully he limited his crowdwork to just a few passing observations and focused on his original material.

The headliner was Gill Cordiner, which was a strange choice since Gill is better known for her corporate work in Australia (and that is exactly what we got here) as she treated her headliner slot as a sort of stag-do roasting every man in the front row, objectifying and ridiculing them in a very predictable fashion.  This pleased the younger, drunker elements of the crowd but it was obvious that she just felt compelled to adopt such an aggressive pose to sell her tonally quite different autobiographical show.