ANGUS HODGE & CHRIS KNIGHT VS THE HILARITY CONTINUUM
Producers Bar / The Old Exchange10pm til March 12 (Wed – Sat)
The Old Exchange? Where the hell is that? It turns out the venue is (formerly) The Electric Light Hotel, which was formerly The Producers, which was formerly The Old Exchange Hotel. Grenfell Street, up from The Cranker, on the right before you get to Gluttony. You’re a grown up, you’ll find it!
Performed in a fairly cavernous room with some jazz rock fusion band thumping through the wall (causing a little distraction), Adelaide stand-up’s ANGUS HODGE and CHRIS KNIGHT’s listing in the guide says they are “on a quest to find one good joke, until a portal in space complicates thing”. The suggestion that a one-hour comedy show is going to contain only one good joke isn’t very encouraging. Thankfully their batting average is much better than that. As a means of dressing up two solid stand-up sets from Hodge and Knight, the whole “time portal” thing is pretty clunky. In fact the premise on the night is more that Chris Knight has abused a time portal and keeps doing the same show over and over again to get it right – the quest for ‘one good joke’ is not mentioned at all.
Produced on a shoestring, the staging and script often have issues, but on a couple of occasions they provided huge laughs that I suspect weren’t in the script. Knight stumbling through the ‘portal’ (the curtains) in a particularly un-elegant fashion was one. And when Hodge berates the lighting tech for a late lighting cue, she (Hodge’s girlfriend as it happens) gets the biggest laugh of the night by killing the lights altogether. It was really funny and they should keep it in the show. Clumsy theatrics aside both Hodge and Knight are very likable performers with solid material and good laughs aplenty.
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