1st April, 2016 – Belleville, Melbourne

We’d better start this review with a relevant disclosure.  We are not big fans of improv.

Most improv can be clever, inventive, quick-witted, silly, creative and perhaps all of these.  It can be exhilarating for the performer.  However, most improv is not funny for most of the audience.  But don’t take our word for it.  Go and see stand-up comedy performers at a similar level of experience and compare the laughs per minute with an improv show (we did;  details to follow).

Brianna Williams – ‘Bri’ – made a great introduction to her show and seized our attention.  It seemed that once she had our attention, she then wasn’t entirely sure what to do with it.  Bri introduced herself four times – (or was it five?) in the first few minutes.  Was it nerves or was it meant to be funny?

Whatever the answer, Bri kept our attention.  She has a captivating stage presence.  She got the audience involved early and often, creating little improv stage plays and getting members of the audience help her act them out.  Brave stuff.   Bri even skilfully combined a few of them together later in the show.  Clever stuff.

Great comedy builds tension then releases it.  Many comedians we saw at MICF this year built a little tension then quickly released it, then repeated the cycle.  It’s simple but it works.  In remarkable contrast to those comedians, Bri Williams was extremely good at building big tension and holding it, but it didn’t get released.  Occasional obvious punchlines drew laughs from literally a couple of audience members, which just added to the unbreaking tension.  We were holding the tension with her and for her.  We wanted her to do well. We were looking for the release, but none came.  And holding tension is exhausting.  This show wore us out.  In the back row was one man who sporadically forced out supportive laughs that seemed out of place.  More tension.

Two of the best laugh-getting punchlines of the night came from two audience members invited on stage and thrust into improvised scenarios (well done, Ingrid).  This was a bit awkward because as well as them creating the best laughs of the show, it acutely reminded us of what seemed to be missing from this, a ‘comedy’ show: laughs.

As promised, here’s the comparison we observed on the night: The show immediately after Bri’s was by two relatively inexperienced stand-up comedians who took turns on stage and both consistently got three laughs per minute – not high lpms by comedy standards, but enough to keep the audience hooked.  Those were majority-of-the-audience laughs, not scattered chuckles.

In contrast, once we saw how slowly the laughs were coming in ‘Little Mountain Goblin‘, we glanced at the time and measured that Bri went for about 20 minutes without a majority-of-the-audience laugh.

While we could see this show fitting better into a Fringe Festival than an International Comedy Festival, we have to acknowledge the skill of the performer.  Bri had confidence, performance skills, an ability to build tension and hold it, wonderful stage presence, relatable stories and scenarios.  She just needs to write and include more funny material.   As Chris Rock says ‘you’ve got to have steel in the walls’: she needs more good jokes.  She needs to make her audience laugh more, especially in a comedy festival show.

Note that we say ‘make her audience laugh’ – not to make us (reviewers) laugh, because everyone, including us, knows that reviewers are pompous, no-talent wankers.  However, as much as we don’t care for improv, if Bri had made her whole supportive audience laugh, we’d say so here, but that was the glaring omission from her show: audience laughs.

This was the second-last show of a two-week run, so we couldn’t put it down to first-night nerves or finding her feet.  The show reminded us of a self-written, self-performed high school play.  What it lacked in laughs, it made up for with energy and enthusiasm;  Bri was either incredibly authentic on stage or faked it brilliantly.  ‘Little Mountain Goblin‘ got off to a cracking start, had a long flat middle, and a fizzled end.   In her post-show thank you speech, she confirmed that this was her first MICF show, so we are sure her learning curve has been steeper than the increase in Melbourne hotel room prices during the festival.

If you’ve come this far, please stay with us a little longer because here’s the thing: We think that Bri has a great future in comedy.  We know plenty of comedians who can write great material, but they take decades to master the skills that Bri already has already got nailed: stage presence, creativity, stage craft, playfulness, story-telling, pacing, improvisation, confidence, audience engagement, acting, voice modulation, an ability to build and hold tension and probably more we didn’t notice.  If Bri can get more ‘steel in her walls’ (and learn how to release tension at will) she will be a uniquely formidable comedian.

If Bri reads this, we hope she takes something from this review (at a cheeky minimum, she should at least take the last four words of the previous paragraph as a poster quote). 🙂  She effortlessly does things on stage that most comedians baulk at.  We genuinely hope she maintains her incredible momentum in mastering skills, writes and stage-tests a tonne of solid jokes and weaves them into what she already has.  With ‘Little Mountain Goblin‘ Bri showed impressively how many performance skills she has mastered and for that reason, we trust she will do the work required to fill the few, but telling, gaps in her comedy skillset.  We look forward to her next show to see just how far this skilful, likeable, energetic performer has come.