Whoever said that jokes are only funny when they’re not at someone’s expense has never experienced the triumphant beauty of a well-executed prank. The pride in a job well done, coupled with the knowledge that your actions didn’t result in (too much) lasting physical or emotional trauma can result in conversation fodder for years to come.
Conversation fodder yes, not the foundation of a show that people have paid money for. And yet, after a few tanking jokes early on, Brendon Walsh seemed to think it entirely reasonable to run down the minutes by regaling the crowd with the range of jokes he’s pulled on strangers over the years. And when I say over the years, there’s a lot of them – one story he casually mentions dates back to the late ’90s. If someone you knew kept telling the same story from almost two decades ago, that person could either be very boring or mentally unhinged.
Walsh reads out letters he wrote to companies while working at a boring office job and shows billboards he’s defaced, so it’s less an evening of comedic situations than the scrapbook of stunted adolescence. His enduring message was ‘it’s fun to fuck with people’ – so perhaps this entire set was just a further extension of his ethos, because I certainly feel like I’ve been subjected to an elaborate prank.
BY MITCH ALEXANDER
