Review – Foreign Objects

Soulla Pants, Ting Lim and TM Bishop are three bright sparks hailing respectively from Brisbane (via her Greek  heritage), Singapore and New Zealand, and they’re performing the Fringe this week to share their cultural insights and make us laugh.

Soulla was posted on crowd-warming duties, and livened up the audience with a few jokes on ethnic stereotypes, body issues, food and incest. And once she got on that path she didn’t stray too far from it. Funny if not particularly memorable material. Ting, a self-confessed anti-social moth, also based a lot of her jokes on stereotypes but she took them in a more interesting, aggressive direction — “If you tell me I’m a typically bad Asian driver I will become one, and ram you off the road.” She also relates her experiences smuggling a controlled substance past customs into Singapore (gum), how her friends only set her up with Asian guys (“We’re not like pandas”), and her father’s response when she asked him, as a child, where babies come from (“You came from my balls”). Charming, funny stuff.

TM’s set, which rounded-off the evening, was the weakest — her biggest laugh went to a heckler (not me). Which is not to say she didn’t sell a few funny stories, like her discomfort trying to make sex talk (“Your cock smells really lovely, like kittens”). All told, Foreign Objects is a decent round-up of three confident and talented (if not ground-breaking) comedians.