Are our comedians swiftly becoming the canaries in the coal mine? I saw two shows back to back on Sunday (7 April) and both were well-established and beloved local queer Australians with an ADHD diagnosis who spent at least some of their set talking about their suicide ideation. And it’s hard to laugh too heartily at that kind of material, even in the hands of performers as seasoned as Zoë Coombs Marr and Mel Buttle. You’re just a little bit too busy being worried for them…
A Melbourne International Comedy Festival veteran, Coombs Marr has moved away from her popular and incredibly meta drag persona Dave for this year’s show and has decided instead to mine her entire life for material. And when I say ‘entire’ I mean all the salient, and sometimes just memorable (frogs in toilets, “street pizza” snaps), details since before she was born, presented in spreadsheets or via other platforms to delight and educate the tech nerds in the audience.
Coombs Marr is never less than engaging, confident, smart as a whip and downright funny. And this is another clever and well-crafted show from her, although the partly “choose your own adventure” approach – ‘which hyperlink do you want me to click through to next?’ did seem to derail her timekeeping skills a little, resulting in an increasingly hasty style of delivery towards the end, with multiple time checks and exclamations that she wasn’t going to fit everything in.
But don’t stress Zoë, we don’t mind running over a bit, we just want you to be feeling OK…
Read: Comedy review: David O’Doherty, Ready Steady David O’Doherty, Melbourne Town Hall, MICF 2024
Tickets: $30-$39
Zoë Coombs Marr: Every Single Thing In My Entire Life will be performed in the Powder Room at The Capitol until 21 April 2024 as part of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF 2024).
