Pyramids and Pimm’s

This Melbourne International Comedy Festival show is a collaboration between comedian Yvonne Malik (a self-described “part wog, part bogan”) and 3AW’s Caroline Ferguson. Malik brings her bogan bellydancer from Reservoir together with Ferguson’s inexplicably English (and equally inexplicably clad in riding clothes) Toorak matron, and the two manage to get locked in a basement together. Hijinks do not ensue.

Laughs are pretty thin on the ground in this show, with Malik pulling the same face (see above, left) through the entire hour, and Ferguson seeming to believe that mistaking everyone for the help and being awkwardly racist are all that’s required for comedy. The audience – well-papered with family and friends by my estimation – seemed to find a few funny moments, but the delivery was so awkward and the timing so frequently off that even those died down in the second half of the evening.

Malik scored most of the show’s few laughs, with a bag full of mildly amusing malapropisms. I will admit I sort of snorted when she said they were going to build a house with statues of sphincters at the gate. However, by the time a couple of laughs rolled around, the barrage of ham-fisted parody had wrung any conceivable fun out of the experience. (Not to mention the five minutes of awkward and ill-executed political comedy shoehorned into the show.) It’s possible to make great comedy out of stereotypes, but Pyramids and Pimm’s is an excruciating exercise in how to get it wrong.

I will confess that I heard the Town Hall clock ring 10pm and strongly considered trying to do a runner when I realised we were only halfway through, but the Butterfly Club’s seats are too close together to allow any escape. You have been warned.

Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

Melbourne International Comedy Festival
March 28 – April 22
www.comedyfestival.com.au