[2014038] CJ Delling – Reality Bandit
CJ Delling @ The Crown and Anchor Hotel
6:00pm, Fri 21 Feb 2014
A friend had seen CJ Delling’s show early on in the Fringe; “I think you’d like her,” she had suggested, “she’s got some interesting material.” So, on that recommendation, I elevated CJ from the “maybe” section of The Shortlist, and settled into a second-row seat in a room that didn’t feel like its dozen-or-so audience members were really up for a laugh.
For the uninitiated, CJ Delling is a German-born comedienne: whilst she possesses the awkward lilt that the German accent tends to put on the English language, it’s rendered a little softer – friendlier, even – by her feminine tone and ever-so-slightly self-aware delivery. But her content gets me off-side early – even though it knows it was a joke, my brain refuses to let go of the fact that yes, CJ, there are good German comedians – and I struggle to engage with (attempted) laughs at the German language.
But here’s where I’ve got to make a bit of a painful admission. See… even though it’s only a week into this Fringe campaign, I’m already pretty tired. And so I may have… well, I’m pretty sure I dozed off. And usually a ten second micro-sleep is enough to recuperate and/or scare me back into alertness… but when I opened my eyes, slightly dazed, I think I saw one of the people in the front row turning to look at me… and Delling appeared to be giving me a bit of a silent stare, too.
That may have been a dream, though. I wouldn’t consider that a canonical recollection of events.
Regardless, with doze complete and everyone looking in the right direction, things seemed to pick up a bit. There’s a pervasive thread of material where Delling recounts her time spent as a Bondi lifesaver, some slightly quirky relationship observances, and – in a move that got me back on board – some fantastically breathless disbelief in the claims of homeopathy.
But the last five or ten minutes are Delling’s best. There’s a rush of callbacks late in the show, but the precision with which they’re set up is almost perverse: it’s fantastic to see such elaborate setups (and we’re approaching Rube Goldberg-ian status here)… but the clinical deftness of them is almost too clean. It feels like quality German engineering at its best: solid, dependable, but lacking a little soul.
And that’s how I felt leaving the Cranka after this show: like I’d seen someone who was well-versed in comedy, who had all the knowledge of the techniques and material down pat, but simply wasn’t able to inject the heart, the soul, the personality into the presentation. But, then again, maybe that was all there, and I simply missed it because I was snoozing.
(38) CJ Delling – Reality Bandit: Clinically efficient German comic construction. #ff2014 #ADLfringe
— Pete Muller (@festivalfreakAU) February 22, 2014