Ashton Brown and Louise Beuvink clearly know what they are doing. Each comic has around 30 minutes for their set, and they both rise to the challenge in completely different, yet complementary, ways.

The show really should have been called ‘Schadenfreude – the Musical’, based on the subject matter and Ashton Brown’s gloriously half-assed introduction to the show, involving your Granddad’s dance moves and Coldplay. [More] 

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Two relative newcomers to the comedy circuit share an hour at the new Q Cellar to work up their material on local audiences keen to see what the youngsters are talking about these days. 

At least a fractional cross-section of today’s twenty-somethings are represented here by a bearded, heavy-set bitter and twisted male drama school graduate, and an attractive blonde female cynic with a background in advertising. 

Ashton Brown does his thirty minutes first, entering to Coldplay and instantly apologising for its volume and duration; it takes real comic sensitivity to make an apology work as a joke and not just seem, well, apologetic, but his vaguely valiant attempt to liven it up with some dance moves break the ice to an acceptable degree.

Two years in the game, two-time Raw Comedy Quest semi-finalist, Brown regales us with stories of his parents’ idiosyncrasies, his patchy post-drama school acting career, some ideas he has for religiously themed safety advisory ad campaigns and an iconoclastic assessment of the social integrity of Where’s Wally?.  

He concludes by imagining how it would be being the third hippo to turn up at Noah’s Ark.  A tolerable set infused with conceptual curiosity. With some relaxation and increased confidence there’s definite potential here.

Louise Beuvink enters to her own chosen musical track with her own personal dance technique, and launches into childhood anecdotes to explain the ‘naturally paranoid’ demeanour whereby she prefers self-serve checkouts to avoid perceived judgement by the minimum-wage staff. 

Beuvnik shares a number of aspects of her urbane, somewhat derisive personality, from her personal method for offloading her personal baggage on unsuspecting strangers, to an industry-tested failsafe formula for advertising any product whatsoever. 

Her material goes to deeper into the afternoon’s dark side with ideas for responding to anti-abortion protestors and a particularly cringe-worthy drunken post-party hook-up story to rival the worst of them. 

An adequate hour overall, played to an eager and somewhat generous, moderately sized crowd.  The pair’s combined efforts fall a tad short of advertising hyperbole’s guarantee to have us in stitches, a handful of LOLs notwithstanding. 

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