Comic takes a turn at UFO hunting

Intrepid sceptic and comedian Lawrence Leung investigates the irrational and impossible, along the way finding fertile ground for metaphysical humour.

Lawrence Leung's Unbelievable

Intrepid sceptic and comedian Lawrence Leung investigates the irrational and impossible, along the way finding fertile ground for metaphysical humour.

Tonight he goes where no comedian has gone before, as he does some UFO hunting in Roswell, New Mexico, and launches his own unidentified object into the skies.

The 33-year-old has been performing internationally since 2001, having started doing stand-up and improvised sketch comedy in University of Melbourne revues.

He has taken his solo shows across Australia and the globe, including Auckland, Dublin, four seasons at the Edinburgh Fringe, London's Soho Theatre and several at the Sydney Opera House. He's a favourite at Melbourne's International Comedy Festival, a regular guest on radio breakfast shows and a writer of pranks for The Chaser. His ability to hold an audience has been perfected by a surprisingly lengthy "apprenticeship in the long grass", as vaudeville comedians used to call the years of working draughty halls in small towns in the provinces.

His vast experience is paradoxically at odds with his performing style, which is deceptively quaint, naive and not far removed from an 11-year-old's local church presentation or school social night turn. But the timing is meticulous as he delivers the idiosyncratic material of his own creation.

He's a comic who, if you're unfamiliar with him as I was, grows on you. You have to let him "come to you", as comedy writers like to say of difficult material. For all his childlike anxiety to please, he is always fated to act as the butt of life's indignities. Nothing seems to quite work out for him but, no matter how much he is buffeted, his eagerness to please always picks him up again. He's never in the doldrums and is always able to muster a vestige of hope from somewhere.

Lawrence Leung's Unbelievable, 9.30pm, ABC1