Risqué comedy sails close to the edge
Festivals
The title of the show is Yon and His Prism of Sexy Thoughts, so thank goodness the Artspace was packed with consenting adults. Yon’s the little bald man from Tripod (and was actually introduced this way, so there are no cheap shots here) but for this show he is without his mates.
Is that why I sensed occasional discomfort on his face when he laid down a sexist joke? Because he didn’t have his mates to support his patriarchal humor (again, no cheap shots, really, because he is a male who is a comedian, so of course this delineation has to be fair).
The show begins with a self-depreciative comic who seems to be enjoying himself. There’s a strong level of confidence projected on stage and we know this man, we trust him, so we settle in for a song and immediately wonder: is this another Tripod experience with Yon in the lead and two new people on stage?
Yon does introduce “Tripod” as suddenly having become “more beautiful and more Asian” [a reference to the musicians accompanying him], but the answer is still “no”. This show is much more personal than what we’re used to, with the stories giving precedence to songs. Here is a man who shows off his sexual insecurity, prances his history of late-blooming adolescence onto the stage and speaks of inept attempts at oral sex, then admits it’s why he has to play dirty and hit hard with his female counterpoint (his wife, he claims, is bigger and tougher, so it is presumably okay). Still, with vulnerability fully vocalised, are comics ever really vulnerable? Can you feel that emotion when they’re trying to make you laugh?
I found this show to be heavily ornamented with awkward moments for females; Yon hits on sore points of “abusive” children (“If my kids were my girlfriend I’d have broken up by now”) and says he liked his wife when she was fit because then he didn’t have to lie about how she looked (“Aren’t I lucky I’m with someone who wants to look good for me?”). These border on the very edge of funny and unfeeling.
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Yon asked us to close our eyes and think a sexy thought, then open our eyes and continue to view the show within the prism of that thought, and this might have saved him. That, and the pairing of SJ and Naomune Anzai: a beautiful, redheaded female in a modest, pale, floor-length nightgown singing soprano while playing guitar, tambourine and piano, and a graying, slight Asian man on the synthesiser, also singing soprano and in nightwear. These two somehow made “fucking” seem sweet, which opposed and therefore accentuated Yon’s humour.
But even now, as I’m finally saying the show is laugh-out-loud funny, I can’t help but cringe.
Yon and his Prism of Sexy Thoughts is playing until June 13 at Artspace, in the Adelaide Festival Centre, as part of the Adelaide Cabaret Festival.
For more stories and reviews, see InDaily’s 2014 Adelaide Cabaret Festival hub.
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