Kate Burr – Back In 30 Minutes (It’s @ Lunchtime) (FringeTIX)
Kate Burr @ The Griffin’s Head
12:30pm, Thu 22 Mar 2007
I loved the premise for this show – a quick chunk o’comedy perched within lunch hour, enabling office-bound peeps the opportunity to get some giggles in during the day. And, apart from an over-zealous ticketing person on the door who didn’t mind invalidating my tickets to other shows, this was a pretty successful performance.
Kate Burr, originally hailing from Port Lincoln, has a typical country sense of humour – broad, easy to laugh with, just straight-up laughs. Always staying on the safe side of risqué, she rarely veers into anything overly political or controversial, sticking with giggles centred on wordplay (what do you call a woman in bed with four men? Forni-Kate!) and girl’s football.
And you now what? That’s just fine – she delivers with a massive friendly grin on her face and seems utterly committed to just getting the audience to enjoy themselves – which, by all accounts, they do. And she cleverly arranges a standing ovation for herself at the end of the set by getting the audience to sing The Alphabet Song, firstly to the tune of Advance Australia Fair, but then to Queen’s We Will Rock You. Fantastic :)
I’ll be utterly honest here – I went along to this show actually expecting it to be utterly shit, just hoping that my ticket helped indicate a genuine desire for this kind of event (that is, short-burst comedy in accessible times). Thankfully, despite an inauspicious start, it was actually a hoot – the room was packed, there was a really good audience vibe, and Ms Burr was really quite personable and – dare I say it – enjoyable. Hopefully, this season was successful enough that additional comedians see the opportunity to win some friends by getting out of bed a few hours earlier.
Quite why various reviewers deride the show solely for being country-bumpkin-ish is beyond me; for fuck’s sake, you either laugh or you don’t. And I did.
Hi there, I’m Kate the comedian – loved the review, thank you! :-)
I am sorry about the “over-zealous ticketing person”, that was my mum! She doesn’t get out much, but gotta love her for helping me out! Hope you got to all your other shows during the Fringe okay!
cheers Kate