Asher Treleaven: Smaller Poorer Weaker Cheaper

If you like your comedians swearing and constantly talking about sex (and rubbing their genitals), then you’ll love Asher Treleaven. And many of the mid 20s, 100+ audience laugh uproariously at every single thing he says… including ‘… gee, well that new joke fell flat’. 

Trevelean, in a return visit to Perth’s Fringe World in this new show, apparently sees part of his job as abusing his audience members (or vitriolic swearing about other people he’s met), and the level of hateful humour is epitomised in his statement that his job of comedy is being a ‘professional c…’.

However, if like Jerry Seinfeld, you feel that sex and swearing are the easy laughs, and the difficult way to win your audience is to craft your humour and actually make jokes about things like chairs (very difficult according to Seinfeld) and not resort to Nazi salutes when you are Jewish (‘had it up to here’, he apparently tells a racist), then Treleaven is not your bag.

I was hoping for a bit more of an ironic take with a show title like, ‘Smaller Poorer Weaker Cheaper’, but it feels like he is using this title to pick on others who are smaller, poorer, weaker and cheaper. Treleaven’s ‘contradictions’ include being a well-dressed, well-spoken Queenslander (I think personally he invests too much credibility in suit-wearing) and goes on to say that Mt Isa is just a caravan park surrounded by pit mines filled with sex offenders. On the revelation that one audience member has been drinking since lunch time, he replies it is nothing to boast about and she would have to do better to win his attention because, ‘he deserves it (rubbing his body up and down)… L’Oreal!’ there’s an obvious-ness to his humour that doesn’t require much thinking.

Treleaven also specialises in the self-conscious deconstruction ‘back-chat’ that masquerades as humour in some circles, like his awkward opening riff on the lack of backstage mic and attempts to improvise-rehearse a suitable fanfare entry statement for himself (as demonstrated by himself) at the beginning of the show, and that constant ‘oh, one person liked that joke’ self-interruptions. There is a level of ‘over-acting’ in the part of comedian that, to me, seems evident in some level of uncomfortable-ness; after all, not every comedian looks aside at their watch three times throughout the show.

He gets one point for a well-coordinated diablo demonstration – even there he refers to his ‘hetero normative bit’ as there’s one gung-ho he-man for the boys diablo, and one sexy pussycat diablo demonstration for the women. This guy is not in to breaking any stereotypes. In fact, he has an underlying sexist attitude towards his sexual humour (‘yeah I know about four and a half minutes on the button… I’m not a fucking idiot, I’m a fully grown man’) that I as a woman did not enjoy. He concludes his show with a space invader dance.  Neither of these interludes is particularly related to his comedy show, but perhaps he should concentrate on his physical humour, as his crude language humour has huge gaps in the ‘needs to improve’ scorecard.

Rating: 1 star out of 5