Comedy Festival 2018: James Veitch’s returns with tech bantering in Game Face ★★★
EMAIL takes on a whole new level of fun in James Veitch’s Game Face.
Comedy Festival
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LAST year the bumbling, geekster James Veitch had a hit with Dot Con, a PowerPoint, TED talk-style show documenting his interactions with Nigerian email scammers. This follow up, Game Face, sees Veitch graduated to the Town Hall’s Supper Room playing a full house with no shortage of fans loving his digital bantering and foppish real-life persona.
Like Dot Con, Game Face sticks with a techie-style, the same fumbling delivery and, of course, more PowerPoints. But its transitions and deliver feel slightly undercooked and more haphazard in focus.
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Supermarket grand openings, the pricing tiers of hair salons and traffic violations all get the Veitch treatment, as he delves into hilarious email sparring with customer service departments and council officials.
He pushes back on formalities and the ridiculousness of generic forms by calling out their inconsistencies and general inanity. The more convoluted the conversations get, the funnier they become and seeing them in power point visualises their digital nature to great effect and huge laughs.
Veitch is plenty likeable, so he gets away with his awkward style and fobbed lines, but when he pulls out a guitar, struggles with the amp and then forgets verses of his song, he may just be pushing the friendship too far.
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Still, there are plenty of highs to be had throughout the segments and some of his sprinkled-in musings on adult life are gems. He’s no Romeo, as he freely admits — but he’s one good prankster.
Certainly that should be enough to get a real-life girlfriend that doesn’t identify as a Tinder sex robot.
James Veitch, Game Face
Melbourne Town Hall, Supper Room, until April 22.
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