“I’m 49.” Again and again Peter Berner mentions his age, making sure the fact was nailed into our minds. He tells us that he’s not completely past it yet, but he can’t wait for old age before engaging in the sort of unforgiving honesty that old people can get away with.

His show is all about honesty. He’s honest about himself and his anal bleeding. He’s honest about what he thinks of various countries and their figureheads. He’s honest about thoughts that we all have but don’t dare to express. One of those is “we don’t need everyone”; walking the streets of Adelaide, he says, are many people for whom he can’t see the point. Disguised as jokes, he throws us truths and opinions that perhaps only a jaded 49-year-old would fully notice or express.

One of his items is about what he calls the compassion pie. He talks about all the terrible events happening in the world for which we are supposed to show compassion. But compassion, he says, is a finite resource. He’s right, we’re constantly bombarded by causes and charities and problems, and we seem to care about each new one a little less. It’s a thought that is probably in many people’s minds, just not fully realized. His show is full of these things, little truths that he has worked into joke form.

I found him more interesting than funny, although I still laughed. I went to the show with my dad, who is 48, and he laughed his pants off. Peter’s humour is appreciated more by an older crowd, perhaps. But it was a great show.

Peter Berner isn’t one of those comedians who spend a year writing their shows. For example, he worked Kony 2012 into his act, a phenomenon only a week or so old. He talked about the recent leadership ballot between Rudd and Gillard. His is a dry wit, with his jaded persona and intelligent take on contemporary events. He reinforced his jokes with a shitload of cursewords (ha) but didn’t come off like Wil Anderson, whose punch lines are often based around swearing.

It was at the Comedy Cellar, which is a pretty classic standup bar. The atmosphere was great, and it was a perfect setting for Berner. His act doesn’t really involve audience interaction, and the stage’s separation from the audience worked well for him.

Peter Berner is a very smart funny-man. You can catch him in various media outlets in small doses, but if the chance to see him for a whole hour comes up, take the opportunity. We may not need everyone, but we definitely need Peter Berner.

Two hours of Rob Hunter being a dick to people. What more could you ask for?

The show opens with Rob’s co-host. Luke McGregor is a funny, funny guy, and he warms the audience up brilliantly with his mix of faux awkwardness and anti-jokes. I actually enjoy McGregor’s style more than Hunter’s, he was just that good at delivery.

The show is broken into segments. Each comedian is invited on stage in turn, performing a couple of minutes of their stand-up act. Then Rob proceeds to rip them to shreds in front of the audience, under the guise of an interview. Between acts there is plenty of banter between Rob and Luke, which is consistently hilarious. The show closes with a comedy band, Smart Casual, performing a couple of songs. It’s a pretty strong line-up.

The first comedian is an Australian, Felicity Ward. She subjects us to a couple of minutes of her act, and I don’t take to her. She is that classic ‘talking about personal issues for laughs’ kind of comedian, which I don’t find amusing. It’s a tired bit, and pretty standard for your run-of-the-mill comedian. Hunter confronts her on this, and many other things.

He phrases his questions in a way that vaguely disguises them as poorly communicated, but they are undeniably offensive. At the start of the interview he uses his appearance to convey an air of innocence, confusing his guests as to his intentions. He gets more offensive with each question, and sometimes he appears to genuinely upset his guests. I’m not sure if it’s scripted, or if the guests are forewarned, but their offence comes across as real.

Because I dislike Felicity Ward, I enjoy his grilling of her. His next guest, Peter Coombe, is easier to like and it is a little harder to get into the spirit of the interview. It is still funny, but it feels uncomfortably close to bullying. It’s all in good fun, we assume, but it isn’t quite as enjoyable the second time around.

The last act is Dave Callan, a comedian who used to be on Rove. He’s a very funny guy, and is very endearing in his little bit before the interview. By now, though, Rob’s grilling is wearing just a little thin. I find that, while his jokes are intelligent, his questions are becoming repetitive and I am laughing less and less. I suppose there are only so many ways that you can offload thinly veiled insults as a questions and, after three interviews, Rob seemed to have run out of ideas.

The show is great in small doses, but I wouldn’t go see it twice. The guests kind of just sit there and take it, but I’m sure it would have been much more entertaining if they had stood up for themselves. Overall, it’s a funny show, and worth going to, but it faded towards the end. This might have been partly because of my personal loyalty to Dave Callan or because of the slight repetition of material. It’s the type of abuse that you love to see directed at someone you dislike, but I found it much less amusing when directed at someone I respect and admire.

As Smart Casual put it, Rob Hunter is a cunt. But he’s a funny one.

The Amish. Mannequins. His dad’s iPhone. Adelaide Metro. MySpace. Hairdressers. Porn. He may lack a theme, but Angus Hodge is not short of topics.

Hodge is a local boy, hailing from the Barossa Valley. He got a foot into the comedy scene through the Melbourne Comedy Festival’s Class Clowns and has been going strong ever since. His show, Angus Hodge is Thematically Challenged, is brilliant. I saw it on a warm evening in Funny Pork, in Rymil Park. He drifted randomly from one topic to another, although he makes particular fun of Adelaide’s bus service. He built a rapport with the audience, despite being heckled, at one point, by a crying baby. While his jokes didn’t send tears of laughter cascading down my face, none fell flat and I chuckled the whole way through.

Angus has a quirky way of looking at the world, and it’s apparent in his jokes. Observational humour is one of his main weapons, and it works for him. He sees humour in things that most people just disregard, like mannequin nipples. It takes a strange mind to truly notice mannequin nipples.

Funny Pork is one of the smaller tents, and there is very little separation between stage and audience. Hodge made sure the separation was as small as possible: he made everyone sit up the front so he could engage with them. He enjoyed the interaction, and so did the audience.

His girlfriend’s parents happened to be watching the show that night, which he used to his advantage, and our amusement, by getting really awkward when delivering his porn-related jokes. There were some European tourists in the crowd as well, and he made jokes about Germany, which they appeared to enjoy (apparently the rest of Europe doesn’t particularly like Germany).

The fifty-minute show went by, as Hodge might have said, like an Adelaide bus while you’re waiting for it at a stop: too fast. I didn’t want the show to end. While I wasn’t laughed off my seat, I was entertained the whole way through. Angus Hodge may be thematically challenged, but he’s certainly not comedically challenged.

I found this review pretty hard to write because, well, there really wasn’t that much to write about. Twins is a story about a pair of people and their problems. And that’s about it. They disguise it well with quirky dialogue and some heartfelt speeches but, in the end, there didn’t seem to be much to it.

When I walked into the Reading Room and noted the number of people there, my first thought was that this was a small-time show. My expectations were of a flimsy student performance, perhaps a couple of forgotten lines and some cringe-worthy acting. It’s a nice place, the Reading Room, and the thirteen or so people who had gathered to watch Twins looked comfortable as they reclined in couches or perched on stools that were scattered apparently at random. I thought that the idea of holding a play there was ambitious, and the simple surroundings and props that Twins required meant that the Reading Room suited it nicely. It was a nice atmosphere and a nice place to put on a small show.

The acting itself was pretty good. As far as I could tell, no lines were forgotten, there were no breaks in character, and most of the dialogue was delivered coherently. All three actors played their parts well, and seemed professional, although not outstanding. It was the story that was the let-down for me. It wasn’t a particularly exciting tale, and it was a shade too predictable.

The twins, Sam and Patti, live a lonely life, and take solace in their time spent with each other. They tell each other cute stories to pass the time, they read books and make meals. They also drink a lot. The descriptions of ‘the nightclub’ were great, painting a great picture of the seedy establishment in which Sam worked. A new person enters their tiny little world, causing problems and division, but soon the twins overcome and conquer, just as you’d expect them to. The way they go about it is a little bit of a twist, but nothing that really came from left field.

The twins are good characters, with both good and bad features, but the newcomer, Tai, isn’t as well portrayed. The play is nicely written, with some emotional speeches and some brilliant descriptive dialogues. But, again, the story just wasn’t engaging, and I found myself getting a little bored as I watched it. As we were leaving, I noted that most of the small audience seemed to feel the same.

If you’re into small plays in comfortable and pretty intimate surroundings, it’s not the worst way to spend an evening. But nor was it the best.

I went to Simon Taylor’s show on a Monday night suffering from a head cold. In the mood I was in, I was not expecting to enjoy it, or anything; I just wanted my bed. But perhaps, as Taylor was to say during the show, the secret to happiness is low expectations.

Not that low expectations were required for his show. Like a bucket of icy water on a sleeping baby, Simon woke me from my daze with his intelligent jokes. His seemingly spontaneous dances made my sore eyes smile. His myth-busting provoked forth little fountains of mirthful snot. I was a wretched mess of laughter.

Monday nights aren’t known as peak crowd-pulling time. Even though it was a relatively quiet night, however, Taylor threw himself into his performance. At one point he booty-shook so hard that his microphone pack fell out of his pocket and broke.

He is a very talented dude. His dancing skills are surprisingly good, and his singing was easy on the ears. He is a comedian who uses his brain, and his psychology degree, rather than situation and slapstick. His rants about coffee and language were particularly impressive, demonstrating that he can talk for a very long time on one breath and showing the genuine intelligence behind his comedic persona. He sung songs about love and happiness, deconstructed his psychology textbook, danced, told jokes, had quiet moments of faux audience introspection, performed magic tricks and busted myths. And was hilarious the entire time. Coming from a family where vegetarianism is rife, I enjoyed his list of vegetarian foods: fake bacon (facon), fake sausage (fausage), and fake duck … fuck. The show concluded with Taylor giving us his promised list of ten things he knew about us; it was a clever device and gave a pleasing sense of closure, as well as some final laughs.

I hung around the foyer afterwards, hoping to get a quick interview; of all the people meandering out of the theatre, none was missing a smile. Taylor was mixing it with the crowd, and I asked him for a last word. He said to “Tell people to take a chance on my show”. I say, don’t take a chance on this show; make an educated assessment of whether you want to spend 50 minutes laughing your snot out. The choice is yours. But do it.

So speaks the good-looking man sitting next to me in the front row of the Deluxe. It’s a nicely air-conditioned island in the warm and moist Garden of Unearthly Delights. There is an edgy air of anticipation for the show and an undercurrent of anxiety, especially in the front couple of rows. Sam is well known for his comedic genius, and equally well known for his delight in picking on audience members.

He enters to some shitty music, his balding head shining in the spotlight. Maybe he is aware of the distracting glare because he soon dons a cap. Right from the beginning he has energy and he’s clearly enjoying himself. Although no doubt he has run through the jokes and sketches hundreds of times in practice, you can still see his little smiles of satisfaction when they go down well. The stage props are simple – there’s plenty of shitty Ikea furniture – but he’s got a great story for each one. He breaks character a couple of times, but always to pull in another laugh. Soon enough, the time comes for him to humiliate an audience member who, coincidentally, happens to be the man next to me who earlier expressed his fear of being picked on. Well, he shouldn’t have sat at the front. Sam rubs his sweaty belly all over him. On two separate occasions. Poor guy.

The show is based around a main narrative – the story of The Man, a sad and lonely man who therefore makes a perfect target for some pithy comedy. This narrative takes several wide, absurd, and hilarious turns, from the ritualistic humiliation of the man next to me, to some ridiculing of the shitty Ikea furniture, to descriptions of himself as “Doctor Phil’s inbred cousin” and an “AIDSy Magnum P.I.” It is punctuated by sporadic rants that involve The Man being kicked out of various establishments. Sam’s use of analogy is brilliant: “The Man felt like a Lego dildo lying in pieces on the bathroom floor”. At times Sam breaks into song; he has a surprisingly good voice. I don’t realize how absorbed I am in the performance until it ends with him finally constructing the coffee table (which won’t mean anything to you until you see the show).

Apart from the moist spattering of sweat I receive as Sam is straddling my neighbour, the show is brilliant. I laugh, the rest of the audience laughs, Sam laughs. Even the poor victim of the sweaty belly-rub laughs, at times uncomfortably. We all have a great time, and I walk away happy. Everyone, it seems, walks away happy.

While I wouldn’t recommend this as a family show (it was the first time I had ever heard the phrase “choose a cunting sandwich”), it is definitely going to be the highlight of my week. And it is only Sunday.