Presented by Max Atwood & Paul Culliver
@ Cuckoo Bar
MONDAY 12th March (until March 18)
These two twenty-two year old Melbournian comedians are not your well-known Ross Noble or Frank Woodley (yet). Nor do they try to be. They don’t pretend to be anything other than two twenty-something comedians, performing for the love of it in a small Adelaide pub. They casually mingle with the audience before the show (whilst constantly reminding us that their mingling is not part of the show, and that the show has not started yet, therefore please wait five more minutes until the show begins and then feel free to judge us) before scurrying behind the curtain to start their performance for real. Attwood and Culliver met at uni and started working together a couple of years ago on a project for Channel 31, before performing at the Melbourne Fringe last year, and again in Melbourne and Adelaide this year.
The Cuckoo Bar on Hindley Street was a small space, and filled with people I think it would have created a good atmosphere for the show. However, on the night I attended, there were only seven people in the audience. This meant the comedians had to do more work to keep the audience engaged and they had to create the atmosphere themselves, which they both managed without difficulty, and they didn’t let their small audience affect the energy in their performances. I asked Attwood if he found it difficult performing for a small audience, and he explained that ‘it’s only hard until you start talking to them. But then you get onstage and you see everyone laughing, and you don’t care.’ Culliver added that ‘three people sitting in the audience enjoying the show, for us, is much better than thirty people sitting there not laughing.’ This shows that for these two comedians, it really is about getting up on stage, having a good time and making people laugh.
On this particular night, Max Attwood, or, as he introduces himself, the man who resembles a Lego-box man with his haircut, got the honour of performing his set first. Attwood took a little while to warm up, but once he did and once he got into the rhythm of his anecdotal jokes, his theatrics lifted and he found his pace. Adelaide jokes were guaranteed to crop up, although I was pleased to discover that when they did, both Attwood and Culliver managed to steer clear of the clichéd “back-water” jokes that are too far worn to be funny anymore and create their own, original Adelaide mockery. It is an expectation that comedians mock Adelaide when they perform here, and I would have been disappointed if they’d decided to leave out Adelaide jokes altogether.
Paul Culliver, or, as he refers to himself, a man who decided to grow a beard so he didn’t look like a twelve-year old (only to look with a 12-year old with a beard), seemed much more sure of himself on stage than his partner, and began his set with a quirky little improvised dance. While strange, I thought it was a great way to separate the two sets and introduce the audience to Culliver’s performance. Culliver was much more theatrical than Attwood and seemed more at ease with the small audience. From start to finish he blasted through his set, occasionally interacting with Max backstage, destroying any illusion that this show is anything but a couple of mates performing for a few friends. For me, it was this casual, laidback attitude that really made the show. They embraced the format and the nature of their small show and made it work for them, rather than against them.
I would have been interested to see more interaction between Attwood and Culliver, rather than having two distinctly separate sets, yet even so both comedians performed with different styles which allowed the audience to view them as two individual comedians as opposed to a duo. Don’t let a seven-person preview night audience put you off going to the show. This stand-up performance blatantly refuses to take itself seriously, and that is what really struck me about the show. Come and join us, Attwood and Culliver seem to say, let me spend half an hour showing you what the world looks like to me. It’s definitely a funnier existence through their eyes.
