The Boy Who Cried Sober is billed as the truth behind 10 Years and the years that followed. As Fleety’s fame grew, so did his heroin habit, a poorly-kept secret that cost him pretty much everything – personal relationships, professional success and self-respect. In the hands of a performer as clever, innovative and candid as Fleety, this could have been one of the most affecting storytelling pieces ever written, but he baulked. For god knows what reason, instead of crafting a narrative arc that would carry the audience through a beginning, middle and end, down through the bleakest depths of his career and out the other side, he delivered a half-arsed stand-up show with some confronting personal material and a whole lot of tired, scattershot bits.
Huge chunks of the show were devoted to Lance Armstrong and Oscar Pistorius. With only a tenuous drug abuse link, these segments were just a bog standard rehash of recent news, about which there is nothing funny left to say. At one point in the show, Fleety began a longwinded story about a curb-side preacher in Adelaide, only to get distracted and leave the joke unfinished. Who knows where he was going? I’m not sure I cared.
Without a doubt, his best material was about his addiction, about becoming a commercial radio jock and getting caught in the toilets with dope, about watching his friends (and lesser comedians) become millionaires while he fucked up and then fucked up some more. This stuff was raw and incredibly real – it felt as though there was an actual human being holding the microphone – but there simply wasn’t enough of it. The material wasn’t just unpolished, it wasn’t really there. And that must be the greatest wasted opportunity in the history of Australian comedy.
BY SIMONE UBALDI
