Review – Where? Why? Where? and Earth: May Contain Traces of Human

A comedy show at RiAus, the Science Exchange, sounds like a recipe for sharp, topical humour on stuff like homeopathy, climate change and evolution. But we only got a little of that with these two shows, Where? Why? Where? and Earth: May Contain Traces of Human. Most of the rest was generic stand-up, almost as if the two comics, Seaton Kay-Smith and Jazz Twemlow, got the gig because they knew someone and promised they could make ‘science jokes’. They would have probably done better at the Rhino, or anywhere that serves wine in plastic cups.

Seaton’s show was about half an hour of awful puns. Awful as in groan-inducing (“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? Albinos”) and as in tasteless and offensive (“I have a tart in the fridge. I like tarts. But there’s not any oxygen in there so she’s probably dead.”). There were some segues to keep it fresh — a rant about cakes, for example, and why he doesn’t like any of them. But then it was straight back to his non-stop pun-recitation. The few moments where the show worked (“There’s more than one way to skin a cat. Unless you’re a purist.”) mostly came when you started to feel sorry for him (it’s hard not to feel sorry for someone who’s eaten a bunch of chillies and is literally choking on stage).

Jazz Twemlow was a little better. As mentioned, he managed to fit a homeopathy gag into his show (go science!) but even though most of his stand-up was okay it wasn’t really related to science or even the theme of his show (which was, ostensibly, a dissection of human conquest and failure). I would give Jazz another watch, though, even if he leans a little heavy on the pedophile-beastiality jokes (in Sydney, he assures us, they kill).