27th September, 2015 – The Hive Bar, Erskineville, Sydney
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During the 2015 Sydney Fringe Festival, we’ve had the opportunity to see Ben Willshaw’s ‘Sticks and Stones‘ twice: two of his three solo debut shows.  We saw the first of his shows by planning to, and the other through needing to fill time between other shows we were seeing.  We were glad we did.

The venue for ‘Sticks and Stones’ was The Hive Bar in Erskineville.  It’s a cosy, intimate venue for comedy – which has potential to be very uncomfortable for a comedian if things aren’t going well.  However, Willshaw wouldn’t know that – well, not on the two nights we saw him.

Risk is essential to good comedy.  Making your solo stand-up comedy debut is a risk.  It’s a risk that Willshaw perhaps aimed to reduce by booking support acts to open his show for him.  At face value it’s a modest and sensible move – if the show doesn’t go as well as expected, the blame can be silently shared.  Besides, if things go well, there are a couple of different comedy styles for the audience to enjoy.  Willshaw took the unusual step of having a lot of support acts.  Seriously, I lost count.  Was it eight?  Ten?  Is he messing with us?  Is he actually going to perform himself or is this a comedy hoax?  By the fifth support act, we’re at the peak of a nice tension.  Then audience members start exchanging puzzled glances and whispered WTFs.  The tension starts to dissolve…

So after the unexpected, but funny, comedy showcase we finally get to see Ben Willshaw take the stage, which he does confidently and skilfully.   He commands attention (and quickly rebuilds that lost tension) with his movement on stage, starting with a deliberately funny audience roll-call, rules for the gig, then launching into some great physical comedy interaction with some members of the audience.  Energetically, Willshaw now owns the room and he is playfully squeezing the laughter out of it.  He moves smoothly into his more structured comedy material. Between punchlines he keeps our laughter rolling with comical movements, funny gestures and hilarious facial expressions.

His show’s title evokes images: the sharpness of sticks and the bluntness of stones.  Whether by coincidence or planning, we saw the title repeatedly resonate in the show’s structure and technique, as well as its material.  On stage, Willshaw picks up blunt (often brutal) topics and comically dissects them with surgical precision.  Then he picks up razor-sharp topics and cudgels the laughter out of them.  Then to keep us on our toes, he’s back to blunt stuff – ha, no, tricked you, we’re back to the sharp stuff – ha, no, tricked you again!  It’s like playing a comedy version of rock-paper-scissors but there’s no paper and no rules!  Scissors (sticks) beats rock (stones) whenever Willshaw decides he wants it to!

One outstanding example of his comedy skill was to take the brutal subject of domestic violence and slice us off a comedy fillet: a five-word joke that brilliantly epitomises the stupidity of people who commit domestic violence.  He slices off another comedy morsel by performing a four-word act-out of that character.  It’s made even more clever by its simplicity.

Perhaps the show’s name is also meant as a warning – a reminder that words can’t hurt us.  Some of us hang tightly to this reminder as Willshaw strides us into some rug-covered topical minefields – as well as domestic violence, there’s obscenity, arson and vandalism, public violence and sexual abuse, to name a few.

Surprise is essential to good comedy.  Big surprises come from big (successful) misdirects and redirects and Willshaw expertly wields these comedy tools.  His performance on stage is engaging and confidently reassuring so we, the audience, go with him nervously as he leads us boldly into these comedy minefields.   Many of us have seen other comedians die out there.  Do we really want to be at his side when Willshaw goes a step too far?

As we are standing tensely in his topical minefields, he whips a punchline rug out from under us.  Then another. Then another.  We are laughing in waves now, not only at his repeatedly deft removal of rugs from underneath our feet, but also laughing in amazement at how many layers of those comedy rugs he had placed under our feet without us noticing.  Our laughter is underpinned by our nervous wondering of how many rugs are still between us and those comedy landmines.  Surely we can’t get any closer without an explosion… and then he whips away another rug….more laughter….

To build so much comedy tension while keeping an audience with you is tremendously skilful.  To hold and then release that tension in so many controlled stages provides more than laughter – it provides a captivating comedy experience.

What was even more remarkable about Willshaw’s debut comedy shows was that the two shows we attended were significantly different in content.  Both were hilarious.  Both were superbly structured and delivered comedy.  When we asked him about this after the second show, he told us that he saw quite a few people back for the second time so he thought he’d mix in some different content to keep it interesting for them.  We are gobsmacked that a ‘new’ comedian with the safety net of so many support acts is still confident and competent enough to do some spontaneous triple-somersault-double-twist trapeze tricks.  Or were those ‘support acts’ just more of his clever misdirection?

You can watch and marvel at Ben Willshaw’s comedy structure and the complex layers being delivered with deceptively easy precision.  Or, like most of his audience, you can just laugh and enjoy being so thoroughly entertained.  We got to see ‘Sticks & Stones’ twice, so luckily for us, we got to do both.

With razor sharp sticks and brutally blunt stones, Willshaw gave us a masterful comedy battering, but at the end of his shows the only thing that hurt was our stomach – from laughing.

If you didn’t know these were Willshaw’s debut shows, there was nothing in the content and the delivery that would indicate that.  His jokes are tight and his fluid performance on stage belies his relatively short time in comedy.  We look forward to his next solo show with fewer safety net support acts and even more of Willshaw immersing himself even deeper into his comedy craft.