Elbowskin presents…Comedy Gondola .


Friday 17th March


Who can resist free tickets to a show, especially when they are offered to you by an eager, excited comedian looking at you with pleading eyes, desperate for an audience? I still can’t get over people’s indifference to these performers offering free entertainment and having to almost beg for an audience. We’ve seen all the big names on television, why not try something new? Who knows what you might discover.

Unfortunately, this offering wasn’t going to be a huge discovery, not yet anyway. It was a structured show rather than ‘stand-up’ comedy, but they still tried for audience participation. Tonight’s 18 audience members weren’t going to make it easy for them, despite the performers telling us on numerous occasions what a great audience we were and so much better than last night’s. The audience were mostly 20-30 something females (I think there were 4 males amongst us).

They used a video screen behind the stage throughout their show. It delivered their introduction, showing the two performers sitting in a Gondola musing why they had called the show ‘Comedy Gondola’. They couldn’t come up with any ideas, but suggested it was too late to change the name now. We were then treated to a puff of smoke to create the mood and the performers arrived.

They sang songs, played their guitars and tried very hard to entertain us. They did have a few clever moments and were generally very appealing. They genuinely apologised to a girl in the front row for shocking her with some of their song lyrics and again told us what a great audience we were, but it was clear that these two guys had really wanted to make it as musicians, deciding to try their luck at comedy instead.

They even tried to make us laugh by singing in German, it was much funnier than the English version they sung first. Shapelle Corby entertained us in the breaks, depicted by a shadow puppet of a Balinese woman on the screen, smoking, shooting up and snorting drugs. The puppet jiggled frantically, went out of focus and danced around looking very mellow. This really got the audience giggling, they wanted to laugh, they tried really hard to be entertained.

With some better quality material, these guys could really be entertaining. They had appealing stage presence and sung and played guitar very well. The use of the video was cleverly integrated into their act, especially the ‘music video’ clip to one of their songs.