Review – Greg Fleet: The Games Master
On Friday night, Greg ‘Fleety’ Fleet was, by all accounts, a pro. A long-standing figure of Australian comedy, Fleet demonstrated a real knack for reading his audience – while not an improvisational comic per se, he allowed himself room to move within his jokes and between them, exploring different beats until he found his mark.
In Friday’s show, for example, he talked about Nazis, zombies, casual racism, gay marriage, his daughter, and inherited wisdom – the latter a clear crowd favourite, owing to a five-minute discussion of the old adage ‘never bring a dolphin to a knife fight’.
It was a hard show to judge. At times, the same rewarding self-awareness that led to so many changes in topic came across as slightly neurotic, and left the crowd looking a bit jumpy – Fleet himself, ever self-deprecating, thanked his audience for sitting through a show that was “a bit ropey”. But there is a reason Fleet is an icon of comedy in Australia. He’s simply very funny and, perhaps more to the point, a good entertainer, ironically using his own negativity to create an upwards vibe. If you want to see a show that’s “like Hamlet, but different” (his own words) then Greg Fleet is the comic for you.
