Anyone who watches Rove, as I gather many folks do, will already be familiar with Peter Helliar.  On his poster, and indeed in real life, he looks like a cross between Keifer Sutherland and Philip Seymour Hoffman. He talks with an Australian accent which we unfortunately can’t harass him for, because even more unfortunately he’s from there. 

I don’t mean that, I’m just filling this out as best I can on the topic of the show of a typically low-budget badly dressed comedian who tells some jokes and makes everyone laugh, talks a lot of shit and makes everyone laugh, skulks slowly and sheepishly backwards offstage and makes everyone laugh. 

Apart from being Australian and a celebrity, albeit one I wasn’t familiar with myself, there’s little to distinguish Helliar’s production from the others.  In fact he may well be the among the most generic – and/or unpretentious – but we laughed and laughed and at the end we left with high levels of serotonin in our brains, so mission accomplished.  He is highly skilled in the craft of rambling on about mostly pointless rubbish.  

On this night his most impressive stunt was incorporating the contribution of a gung-ho heckler whom he dubbed ‘Gavin’, who shouted ‘Smoking harms others!’ just as Helliar was inquiring whether we had the graphic anti-smoking pictures on our cigarette packets, leading him to the logical conclusion that, since we haven’t the budget for the images, we must simply hire Gavin to shout warnings whenever someone sparks up.  Brilliant.

Helliar is simply being himself, or at least his comedic persona, playing his willingly paying and seated theatre crowd with his jovial arrogance and his comfortably volatile mix of honesty and showmanship – and only he knows what percentage of each makes up the recipe.  Peter Helliar is Peter Helliar like any bare-bones style standup comedian is who s/he is (e.g. from this 2007 comedy festival: Ed Byrne, Dylan Moran, Stephen K. Amos, Brendhan Lovegrove … ), communicating his humour in ways he may well not fully understand himself but which just works, so who cares how. 

It’s a bit like Douglas Adams’ famous flying lesson: Jump off something high up, and miss the ground.

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