Dave Hughes @ Scott Theatre
7:00pm, Fri 20 Feb 2004
Score: 7
Short Review: All in the delivery
First up: this is straight stand-up. No “themes”, no recurring threads – just joke after joke, punctuated by self-effacing remarks and “it’s great to be here” comments.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Dave seems to amble from topic to topic, covering water restrictions, snotified bench presses, Guy Sebastian, his love affair with CentreLink and McDonalds, farmers, WMDs, and Vegemite: “it’s brown and it smells – I don’t like it.”
And it’s the abrupt nature of his comments (such as the one above) that make him so funny; it’s the one-second gag that takes twenty seconds to laugh out of your system. I suspect a lot of his material wouldn’t survive in another comedian’s act – but his classically Australian delivery (he uses the euphemism “root” copiously) is impeccable.
This is the first time that I’d seen Dave live (after having seen his TV bits on a few occasions previously), and it was everything I expected. This was the first of his four sold out shows, and there’ll be few punters going away unhappy.