Its a smallish weeknight audience at the cost little downstairs venue at the Rhino Rooms – just ten or so people and one enormous moth which Kent Valentine has a bit of fun with, eventually shooing it out the back door with some assistance from the sound man.
Such a small crowd and another hot night (this is now the longest recorded run of 35+ degree days in an Australian state capital) doesn’t make for an instantly energisable audience, and Kent didnt do a great deal at the start to whip us up into a fever of hilarity with any big gags. It soon becomes clear tho that smartass punchlines isnt the man’s stock in trade, in fact he is at least as much a story teller as he is a comic.
Storytelling is something of a lost art, and for a while I once thought a parallel ciruit of storytelling gigs might evolve, but instead those who wish to weave tall tales can do so quite comfortably within the stand up circuit as long as there are some giggles along the way – as there are in most good tales of course.
This show is mostly centred around two stories from Kent’s youth – the first in which he learns to make napalm with a friend, and perhaps unsurprsingly, ends up blowing something up. This serves as a prelude for the main story which takes place on a trip to Denmark he embarked on partly in order to escape the “paying out” (piss-taking) he was getting from his folks following an embarassing incident of mildly incestuous “pashing” (snogging) – (hope my UK readers are enjoying these little bits of Aussie slang!).
This story gradually builds with some vivid scene setting and reaches a crescedo point which is really quite exciting and involving and must have been quite terrifying at the time, and resolves with some tragedy and enough comedy to keep us all happy.
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