Have you ever wanted to see a man fellate a condom stuffed full of ham? Because that just one of the many bizarre sights you will witness at David Correos’s debut solo Fringe show. As you can imagine, Correos is a divisive comic. He informs us that bit saw seven walkouts the previous night. There are no such walkouts for that segment tonight, although there was one late on. More on that later…
The show starts innocently enough with Correos going off on an extended riff about his love of onions in general but his hatred of red onions and shallots. It is one of those bits that goes way past the point it should and stops being funny but then does comes back around again. He does some other relatively straight, if off-kilter, material to warm up the crowd but warns we are going to start at one and finish at a ten on the weird scale. This is a promise he certainly delivers on.
It is hard to say that there is an overriding concept or any sense of cohesion here, even though Correos does tack the theme of nostalgia on at the end. The show is more a jumble of increasingly weird events more than anything. Some of these events are weird and funny, some of them are weird and awkward and some of them are just plain weird.
A highlight is when Correos performs the type of comedy he thinks an Australian critic who gave him a bad review wanted to see. This sees Correos put flour on his face and paint on his lips and then do an odd parody of observational comedy. Another highlight is him doing his unique interpretation of “peacocking” (a male pick-up artist term) which sees him prancing through the audience, near naked, screaming and hissing.
It’s a very, very strange show and definitely not for everyone. Some of it works and some of it really doesn’t. It is however almost certainly unlike any comedy show you have seen before. That said, the aforementioned walkout claimed to have seen this sort of thing “a thousand times before”. So you never know.