Comedy
Ramen Room, The Noodle Palace at Central 
Wednesday 4th February

For someone performing to a crowd of 11 people, Josh Makinda did a remarkable job of keeping his confidence. Switching between conversational audience interaction and long monologue jokes, Colourless Green Ideas is a mix of the absurd and the awkward.

Audience interaction is no doubt a regular aspect of Josh Makinda’s show, but with such a small crowd, it felt like the only way to avoid the show feeling like a comedic lecture (at least more than usual for a stand up comedy routine). This was not helped by the fact that it took place in a TAFE classroom.

Improvisation is Josh Makinda’s strength: he will ask an audience member a question a simple as what their job is, and from their answer his ridiculously lateral mind will take one word or idea and run away with it to the most absurd of places. He acts out the peculiar images in his head, of bald men using pencil shavings for hair or optometrists riding cross-eyed children, then somehow links it back to previously improvised jokes in a way that makes it look as if the audience were all planted and he had planned the whole thing all along.

Ironically though, it’s his planned jokes that let him down. His anecdotes were long, his way of telling them awkward, and the pay off not worth the hesitant laughs we gave him in the hope we would understand where it all was leading.

Despite sometimes feeling like an odd party where no one really knows each other and the host talks way more than anyone else, Colourless Green Ideas was an enjoyable 50 minutes with a lot of genuine, cheek-aching laughs that left us with very strange new ways of thinking about our places of work.

Josh Makinda – Colourless Green Ideas runs at The Noodle Palace at Central until Saturday 7 February and at the Fremantle Comedy Factory @ The Sail and Anchor from Tuesday 10th – Wednesday 11th and Friday 13th – Sunday 15th February. Tickets can be bought here.