Imagine if you were Eddie Izzard and every time you did a stand-up gig the audience would cry out for The Deathstar Canteen. Indeed, if a stand-up comic were to repeat a story or segment you’d seen before you’d be rightly feeling shortchanged. So why is it different with comedians who perform comic songs? Just as Victoria Wood was never allowed to finish a show without a rousing rendition of ‘The Ballad of Barry and Freda‘, Flo and Joan may well now be in the position where they’re going to have to do ‘I Drank Too Much’ til they’re shuffled off the stage in their bath chairs. And, yes, that’s the finale to The Joan and Flo Show that they’ve brought to this year’s MICF 2025.
And, to be honest, none of the audience would have had it any other way. It’s 10 years since English sisters Nicola and Rosie Dempsey launched the Flo and Joan double act and, after a decade, their wit, their sense of the ridiculous, their harmonies and their easy banter with each other and the audience has only become stronger.
It’s not all ‘I Drank Too Much’, this time around. At the preview they trialled a new song about Tony the school bus driver who would gift sticks of gum to the children who’d give him a kiss on the cheek – teaching prepubescents schoolgirls the joys of dodgy transactional relationships from an early age. Understandably, they weren’t quite sure how it would be received, but promised to keep it in the act thanks to the response it got at the preview.
Read: Comedy review: Rob Carlton, Willing Participant, Beckett Theatre, MICF 2025
With such well-rehearsed and tightly honed performances as Flo and Joan are wont to give, it’s actually a joy when that breaks down. At the preview, Rosie Dempsey encountered an egg that was bigger than she expected and, with no hard floor to smash it on, attempted to swallow the thing in one go… which was a mistake but also, hands-down, the biggest laugh of the show.
Tickets: $34-$38
Flo and Joan: The Joan and Flo Show will be performed in the Lower Town Hall until 20 April 2025 as part of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF 2025).
