Comedy Festival 2018: Marcus Ryan builds up pace in Walk This Que ★★★

AFTER an overlong start, Marcus Ryan’s travel story with no intended purpose works through a load of observational carping before arriving at a pretty cool place.

WE rarely get to witness a local comedian in such desperate need of meaning or a routine in such a dire search for purpose as when Marcus Ryan recounts his particularly awful adventure in the spiritual badlands of Spain.

And for minutes on end Ryan sounds like he’s going nowhere, describing his preparation for both the trip and the show that would result from it. It was certainly a bad sign when Ryan began discussing the design for the show’s flyer. The act had only just started and it already felt like he had nothing.

But what starts out as a mediocre travelogue with a crappy slideshow of out-of-ratio photos slowly builds up a head of emotional steam to bring home a satisfying, surprising finale.

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After 15 years of not-very-lucrative stand-up work, Ryan found himself in an existential funk, mid-career and aimless.

So, with no rhyme, reason or any semblance of a moral compass, he decided last year to take on the Camino de Santiago, the famous 1000km trek across Spain.

Over the years, millions have undertaken the trek as a soul-searching pilgrimage in honour of its deep religious and spiritual legacy, which reaches back over a millennium. For Ryan, however, it was a sweat-inducing, joint-stressing, uncomfortable slog.

He bitches about everything: the food, the people, the country, the weather, the sleeping arrangements, even the scenery. It’s standard, observational stuff that gets appreciative laughs.

Yet Ryan maintains a muted pride that he at least accomplished, well, something. At one point he even made fun of an audience member who had only walked part of the journey.

Fighting with himself to give the journey some inner meaning, the best he can come up with is a weak Forrest Gump reference, that he did the walk for its own sake.

Marcus Ryan in Walk This Que.

Yet there is a simmering motive underlying all his gags about annoying travel companions, over-enthusiastic Americans, hipster Australians, yoga rooms, tomatoes and raging bulls.

Ryan proves he’s more than a mere anecdotalist as he engages some classic storytelling devices — foreshadowing and misdirection, especially — to give shape to what for the most part sounds like a formless ramble about a bummer holiday.

Ryan does need to smarten up the technical side of his show by fixing the aspect ratio of his slides, and perhaps having them all around the same size. He could also cut through his preamble and get into the trip itself a tad quicker.

All-in-all, though, Ryan presents a ripper travelogue with some fine foreigner-bashing jokes and a super homecoming.

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Side note 1: The upstairs comedy room at the Elephant & Wheelbarrow has undergone a major makeover. Once it was a standard pub room that had to be temporarily repurposed to take on gigs. Now it has been completely redone as a proper performance space with a dedicated stage area, much better seating and far better acoustics. The improvements were very noticeable.

Side note 2: Comedians often complain of how hecklers are an occupational hazard they have to cope with.

But what, pray, of the cackler, that deeply irritating person with the deeply irritating loud laugh that, in a small room, carries over everybody else’s?

Cacklers also tend to laugh loudly at jokes that aren’t especially funny, or at lines that aren’t jokes at all. And when they cackle they are often out of sync with everybody else.

There was one such cackler at this show, his infernal barking so loud that people several rows away were turning around to see where these obnoxious emissions were coming from.

These cacklers know how disruptive they are being, especially when they deliberately let out a shriek after a collective laugh has subsided.

One can only hope that Satan has a special place in Hell for these people. May they all either shut up or get there soon.

Marcus Ryan, Walk This Que

Elephant & Wheelbarrow, cnr Bourke and Exhibition sts, Melbourne.