To be fair to Amos Gill, he doesn’t attempt to hide his thesis statement – he is out and proud about the fact that he believes he is being targeted, as a straight white male comic, by a “woke” culture which seeks to silence voices like his. He seems to forget that there are too many straight white male comics to count at this year’s Fringe, and many of them, including him, are having a lot of success, performing to packed out venues – and it’s not like anyone is picketing outside his show attempting to have his rambling shows shut down.
Gill is clearly an intelligent comedian, however, full of swaggering arrogance and brilliantly absurd tales, such as a hysterical anecdote involving his ten-year-old self, a doctor, and his mother, or a harebrained scheme cooked up by his mother to get him Croatian citizenship. He can paint lucid visual images and has the skill to follow them through in brilliantly crafted payoffs. In segments about genocide disclaimers at the start of Australian comedy shows and rich people using their financial power to sexually coerce people from the third world, he uses his caustic wit to expose some glaring absurdities in our culture.
But it’s when he shifts back into his show’s anti-woke underpinning that he seems to forget all about being funny and launches into rambling tirades. At one point he got into some hot water with an Australian journalist and was wrongly accused of sexism in an incendiary headline. This incident seems to be the genesis of his new show, and he has clearly taken one instance in which he was targeted by a journalist with an axe to grind and applied it to an entire culture.
Towards the end he even veers into conspiracy theory with his invocation of “cultural Marxism,” and launches into blatant transphobia – maybe, just maybe it’s stuff like that which makes people dislike Gill, not his identity as a straight white man. It’s a disappointing turn for a show which often straddles the line of what is possible well and is, at times, darkly hysterical.
Amos Gill: Going Down Swinging, 19:45, Underbelly, Until August 26.
https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/amos-gill-going-down-swinging
