Anne Edmonds, comedy review: Chatterbox goes to the dark side

Edmonds' tragi-comic portraits evoke both Victoria Wood and Barry Humphries and while there's not always belly laugh humour, her images linger, says Bruce Dessau
Raucous banter: Anne Edmonds
Bruce Dessau7 January 2016

Anne Edmonds’s show You Know What I’m Like is two for the price of one. At first glance this Melbourne comedian making her London debut is an informal chatterbox, cracking good gags about bad gigs. But as her set progresses a darker side and some impeccable character comedy emerges too.

Things start conventionally with a story of playing a rough night in an Outback town with “40 people and eight teeth between them”. An anecdote about being violently sick on a plane and having to walk through immigration carrying two bags of vomit sets the star up as something of a shallow hedonist.

But there is more going on here than the initial raucous banter suggests. Edmonds describes herself as a “sadness sniffer dog” who spots melancholy behind smiles. Thumbnail sketches of distracted suburban housewives, rambling bus passengers and creepy gym obsessives feel like Antipodean updates of Thoreau’s dictum that many of us lead lives of quiet desperation.

These tragi-comic portraits also evoke both Victoria Wood and an earlier Melbourne observer of foibles, Barry Humphries. This is not always belly laugh humour, but the images certainly linger. There are sharp one-liners too. An atheist burial is dubbed “popping into the ground for a bit of a rot”.

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1/10

As Edmonds says during her performance, most of us like to talk about happiness, but sadness is interesting too. And, as she proves, it can also be uncomfortably funny.

Until January 16, Soho Theatre (020 7478 0100, sohotheatre.com)

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