Comedy Reviews : Zoe Coombs-Marr, The Hipster Resistance Variety Hour

By Lisa Dib

Zoe Coombs-Marr : And That Was the Summer That Changed My Life

Zoe Coombs-Marr

Hipster Resistance

The difference between many of the shows I had seen in this year’s Comedy Festival and Zoe Coombs Marr’s is that Marr is more actress than stand-up comic.

She prides performance over zingers (funny lines, not the burgers, om nom nom) and emotion over easy jokes about how different men and women are and how hilarious that still is after 1983, no doubt.

Marr’s show is based around a band camp incident in which, through circumstance lucky only to herself, she got to play all the flute solos in the West Side Story medley even though she was only in Year Seven.

The show touches on growing up gay and dorky, nosebleeds, unrequited love and blossoming into a young adult. Except this show has a dinosaur poem and the brilliant line:  “I think you’re triceratops.”

My previous allusion to Marr’s performance technique possibly gives you the impression that it’s a no-joke show: this a fallacy you must correct. Or perhaps I must for you. Anyway, Marr slips in jokes sparingly but lovingly and relies more on amusing, smart observations; a childhood teachers’ explanation of religion (“Heaven is a city roughly the size of Sydney!”) is especially hilarious.

The show veers into the delightfully bizarre as- SPOILER ALERT- Marr tears off her parachute gym jacket show uniform to reveal a dinosaur leotard, the use of which becomes clear when the dinosaur sings Evanescence’s My Immortal to a lost love and Marr cries genuine tears - how’d you learn to cry on demand?, as Ryan Adams once said.

The climax of the show is a big band finale you probably won’t see coming, so I shan’t give away too much.

Sufficed to say, Zoe Coombs Marr is smart, loveable and ballsy and, above all, a sublime performer- you’ll love her.

The Hipster Resistance Variety Hour

Though Australian sketch shows in the modern day are about as funny as tinea, perhaps the major channels should look to the Hipster Resistance Variety Hour kids in a few years.

Maybe we’ll have something funny to watch that’s grown in our own backyard, and we won’t have to keep being flooded in Hard-Nut Ozzie Croime Shows Mate How Tuff Are We.

The HRVH project consist a bevy of different and likeable performers: Halley Metcalfe, Shannon Woodford, The Ukulele Brothers, Catherine Hall and Nic Kaschke, most of them RAW finalists and all of them very funny.

The hour is amusing sketches sprinkled with songs from the Ukulele Brothers and hipster jokes; in particular, sketches about a Zumba-crazy doctor, cruel gym membership spruikers and a sad, creepy stand-up comedian, brilliant played by Woodford.

Aside from the very occasional foray into the land of Musical Comedy Averageness, the show is a fun, warm and edgy comedy hour.

It doesn’t rely on done and dusted themes or heinous celebrity impressions (seriously, Ben Elton, what the hell?); Hall and Woodford, in particular, are great natural performers and I can hope the Comedy Festival isn’t the only time we’ll see them around.

Fiona-Scott Norman makes an appearance as guest comic, peddling some material from, assumedly, her own show Disco: The Vinyl Solution.

She talks of partnered dancing and rap music amusingly, but I felt a guest comic fiddled with the flow of the show too much and an extra few skits would have been more enjoyable.

The show ends with the HRVH cast vowing sweet revenge of the fiendish hipster ilk; but they realize that, hey, hipsters aren’t so bad.

Michael of the Uke brothers wears skinny jeans and Kaschke has very trendy-looking horn-rimmed specs. “Maybe there’s a little hipster inside all of us” the message becomes.

Although I can’t agree with either pitchfork-ing hipsters to death or becoming one, it was terribly amusing to see a theme we call relate to.