Tiny King - Sydney Fringe Festival (2024)
Presented as part of Sydney Fringe Festival
A heartfelt and self-reflective comedy of absurdity, incongruity and awkwardness
Reviewed by Juliana Payne
The Factory Theatre, Marrickville
18-20th September 2024
Fringe comedy is traditionally the training space, where baby comedians test and trial, build their chops and hone their skills. It’s not easy and it’s rarely pretty. So it takes some kind of steely determination to want to be a stand-up comic. Nathan Hugh Robert (Robert pronounced in the French way like Stephen Colbert) has taken up the challenge and makes a pretty good fist of it. Performing solo in the aptly named ‘Workshop’ space at The Factory complex, he is certainly testing and trialling and shows some definite promise. The shrieks of laughter from the audience certainly seemed to indicate so.
Robert is one of those comics who cuts open their own heart, soul and experience and lays it out for the audience to laugh at. He delves deep into his own embarrassments and disappointments to cultivate the laughs. Often they may be groans of acknowledgement or recognition, but that’s part of the deal. His is the comedy of absurdity, incongruity and awkwardness. He’s onto something, and with some further thinking and sophistication in his approach, can grow the awkwardness into truly fine-tuned comedy. There’s some nice visual gags, like the impossibly tall microphone that stands 3 metres high on stage before he enters and that we know is going to be the source of the first joke. There’s a few missed opportunities, like the guy who left halfway through and didn’t suffer nearly enough from some sharp lines from Robert, and who then returned to his seat, again without getting made the butt of any jokes.
If Robert is like other great comedians, he’ll analyse and agonise over each performance, refining the good stuff even more, ditching the duds, or changing them to extract the maximum laughter from the audience. There’s great potential for comedy that doesn’t rely on punching down others, on crude racism or sexism, but that finds the absurd and the ridiculous in ourselves, and makes us aware of it and able to laugh at it. Who knows, it might even make us better people. But hey that’s not the job of a comedian – they are just there to make us laugh. And Robert did exactly that.
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