[2013046] Jack Gow in Tragicomic
Jack Gow @ Gluttony – The Runt
11:30pm, Fri 22 Feb 2013
I’d chatted to Jack Gow a few times prior to this show: he and Nick Fischer are friends from the Sydney comedy scene, and were working as a mutually-supportive team as they tackled the Adelaide Fringe. Having a friendly chat with one in the Fringe Club soon led to a discussion involving both, and a combination of Gow’s use of language and his somewhat shy demeanour – and, it must be said, a late and conflict-friendly timeslot – saw me at Gluttony on a pulsing Friday night.
I arrived early and – as is my wont when seeing shows solo – I hung around the venue waiting for the doors to open. I’m soon chatting with Fischer – he’d just performed his last show earlier that evening, and he appeared to be equal parts exhausted and delighted. Gow stopped by – there was barely enough time for me to say break-a-leg (what is the correct good-luck term for comedians?), but plenty of time to notice that he was really nervous… it was only after he left that Fischer told me that (a) it was Gow’s opening night, and (2) his Mum was going to be in the audience.
The Runt is about half-full when Gow bounds in and exuberantly starts the show; he’s several notches livelier onstage than off. With only the barest recognition of the audience, he opened with a tale of how his girlfriend of five years dumped him… for one of his friends. Who suffered from erectile dysfunction. The level of self-flagellation that followed was indicative of the rest of Gow’s material: he always seems to be beating himself up for events that befall him.
Of course, sometimes he utterly deserves the grief that he suffers: his attempts to consume mountains of hash that he’d inadvertently bought whilst in China (an exchange rate mental malfunction) had utterly bizarre results (and, I have to admit, I was genuinely shocked at many facets of that story coming from one so young… but that’s just my age talking). But Gow makes a point of always trying to find a silver lining in his stories; even his time spent in a Sydney Uni residential college, surrounded by sport nuts who treated him with contemptuous suspicion, had a wonderfully satisfying conclusion.
But that pattern was forgotten for the closing piece: a story of friends gone awry which continues to get more bleak, more depressing. The sudden end of Gow’s show, when he announces it, left me confused: there’s most certainly no silver lining there, and I’m left wondering whether Gow is either insanely brave – or hopelessly misguided – in closing the show like that. On the strength of the rest of his material, I’ve settled on the former; at the very least, he deserves another viewing to help me decide.