The Anarchist Guild Social Committee
The Anarchist Guild Social Committee @ Bosco Theater
11:00pm, Wed 11 Mar 2009
The Anarchist Guild Social Committee sees a fluid cast of Melbourne comics performing a series of sketches. Some skits are bloody funny, some are unintentionally mirthless, but they come thick and fast, with a plethora of running gags and reappearances stringing the pieces together.
I’ll be honest: I only picked this show because it was an opportunity to see Courteney Hocking (who, along with Leung & McClelland, once co-hosted the great Nonstopical podcast). And she, along with the rest of the cast that evening (Pacquola, The Hounds’ Higginbotham, two McKenzies, Bushell, and Caddaye) were uniformly decent.
There were some standout pieces – Drunk Girls Do The Craziest Things was an oft-reported fave, the Disney on Ice bit appropriately short and sweet, and the Women’s Insult Institute being, by far, the high-water mark. Genius comedy that was, and perfectly performed. Those highlights, though, were tempered by the regular smattering of zombie references… I just don’t get zombies. I really don’t understand people’s fascination with all things zombie-rific, so those zombie chase scenes and cameos were completely wasted on me. And there was the odd cliquey reference and faux-fluffed line that raised my ire.
In the end, though, The Anarchist Guild Social Committee was reasonably entertaining, with the brightest parts easily illuminating the darkest.
However…
The real highlight of the show, for me, was meeting Michelle. Michelle’s one of those people I adore and envy in equal measure because she’s a Creative, ridiculously talented in all things arty and able to see the world in a way that I cannot. We sat and we drank and we chatted and we drank and I awkwardly pawed through her Moleskine (full of unbelievably detailed quick sketches that the wine dulled my immediate appreciation of) and we drank and she mocked my unmistakable engineer-iness and we chatted and we drank and we got thrown out of the Garden and we argued about how far it was to her hostel and we walked and she was right and I got home at stupid o’clock. Then fronted for work the next morning.
Good times :)