Jonty O’Callaghan’s Got Some Notes. Etcetera Theatre.

Talented and likeable comedian Jonty O’Callaghan delivers a pleasing 50 minutes of above-par sketch comedy in Jonty O’Callaghan’s Got Some Notes. Loosely framed around a bespectacled and improbably camp theatre director’s search for the perfect audience member, your services may be in demand as part of sketches. You may indeed get the notes on your performance promised in the show’s title. However, the comic interactions are kind, inclusive, deftly observed, and rarely intrusive. Thankfully, the suggestion that the audience prepare an impromptu rendition of Cardi B’s controversial hit Wet Ass Pussy falls by the wayside early on.

Sketch highlights include a snarky primary school teacher whose disappointment with the performance of his school’s Year 6 Ten Pin Bowling team threatens to spiral into unhinged, expletive-strewn abuse. “It’s God’s sport”, he yells at the eleven-year-olds, “and you made Jesus cry”.  Then there is the cleaner in a private club who sweeps in from stage left, wondering what the audience is doing there. “You’d get more fun if you were friendlier, like yesterday’s swingers”, he tells us. Cue some musings on lost sex toys and whether residual liquid evidence of last night’s encounters has been entirely wiped clean from our seats.

Anticipate a Bear Grylls-type character hunting for that most lethal of creatures, the legendary “film bro” who threatens “death by condescension” at a single glance. An Alcoholics Anonymous-style meeting for men addicted to getting their guitars out at parties amuses, as does a CBeebies children’s story that gets decidedly more adult, as mummy Unicorn confesses her infidelity to daddy Unicorn: jellybean tears are sure to flow down cotton candy faces.

O’Callaghan is self-deprecating and charismatic and delivers some pithy one-liners: “We’d taken a mutual decision for her to see other people”, he says of an unsuccessful romantic liaison. We get a “bossa-nova, jazz-type, fusion song” with a guitar accompaniment as a late-show bonus.

Writer and Director: Jonty O’Callaghan