Lost in the Mouth Specific
Diane Spencer @ Adelaide Casino – The Loft
9:30pm, Sat 6 Mar 2010
The Loft, eh? For the uninitiated, The Loft is a little room upstairs from that restaurant at the side of the Casino; to get there, you have to walk through the restaurant itself (always fun with a crowd of well-dressed patrons, and me in my requisite boardies) and up a few flights of stairs. It’s a small venue – maybe thirty people, tops? – and there was a decent crowd in for tonight’s show.
Spencer is a great comic. She is also, dare I say it, a bit filthy. I think that’s awesome; I’m one of those people who think Sarah Silverman’s standup is Great, and Diane is pretty much in the same vein, delving into ideas like using UV lights for semenal fireworks. There’s a cracking tale about her trying to get a “clean” comedy gig that ends with a massive coagulant shit; recurring jokes about garbage-bag bodies, kinky sex, and her breakup with the boyfriend that dragged her to New Zealand are equal parts crude and wit.
But where Silverman will push a joke right to that point where you start questioning whether it’s safe to actually keep laughing, Spencer errs on the side of caution; but that’s OK, because that “caution” is still well within the laughter zone. And that means that a lot of her comedy comes from the dubious, from the risqué… but it’s all done in such a light-hearted manner, with that gorgeously innocent-yet-wicked smile, that it’s impossible not to laugh.
I should have been absolutely smitten with Diane Spencer, with her long red hair and pale skin and bubbly persona and cheeky pommie accent and Kiwi residency; but something (maybe thoughts of another?) stopped me. “No,” said the voice inside my head, “remain objective.” So, objectively, I can safely state that Spencer is a brilliantly filthy comic, well worth seeing. Easy.