Comedy Festival 2018: Demi Lardner on a manic ride in I Love Skeleton ★★★

DIMINUTIVE comic Demi Lardner goes a little crazy in search of her voice.

EVERY weekend you can visit a Bunnings Warehouse (you just sang the jingle in your head) and satisfy a craving for a snag in bread with onions and some dead horse. It’s gloriously predictable.

Lardner’s show is none of these things. It does have moments of dastardly glory (her portmanteau centaur bits, writhing through the audience, telling a man with a beard “You’re not my first”) that we get lost in.

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Then I Love Skeleton gets lost in a quagmire of anti-comedy and loco visual gags that hang together like a discarded bag of bones in a dusty Year 10 classroom.

The bit on Bunt (some sort of creature trapped in a shopping centre wall) gets bogged down (though yielded plenty of laughs) just as her perfectly rendered Insta-mom, Jennifer, was ready to fly like a unicorn emoji followed by three wind puffs (actually farts, cross-check that on your iPhone). It’s weird for the sake of weird ... and it leaves a weirdly dissatisfying feeling.

Demi Lardner has moments of dastardly glory in I Love Skeleton.

Lardner, a hugely talented Best Newcomer nominee, touches on darker themes lightly with her exploration of anxiety through a multimedia call and response, and the decision to just return to bed. When she’s not slumbering from the outside she must be cutting a rug in her bedroom.

The girl can move, her dancing shows off an obvious flair that complements the physical comedy. Her revolting, hilarious baby bird face will be a sight that may indeed flash before my eyes in the moments before I fly the coop.

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Pacing issues aside, her domestic disturbances gear takes the room into a 27-year relationship and the aggressive-aggressive fights that ensue.

She gifts us some great zingers, her glee at using the term “Bone Zone” is infectious. In contrast, constantly breaking the fourth wall throws any momentum off and we zig-zag from set-piece to set-piece without feeling like we know where the show is going.

Lardner’s affectionate relationship with her dad is one of very few threads that gives the show a through-line.

Demi will be back with more fleshed out shows than this skeletal attempt.

Demi Lardner, I Love Skeleton

Victoria Hotel, 215 Lt Collins St, until April 22.

comedyfestival.com.au