Troupe get their freak on

0 Little Death Club offers flirtatious fun

a rapid succession of circus and cabaret acts deliver multiple orgasms to those feeling frisky enough.

Over the course of this particular packed hour, we meet Jess Love, the huffy

hula hooper who is bored of being brilliant, disgruntled mime artist Tipi, hungry for a dose of reality, and guest artist Helen from Finance, a bootylicious Bride of Frankenstein figure, lip-and piano-syncing with alacrity to Vanessa Carlton’s A Thousand Miles.

Their bearded lady Kitty Bang Bang gives ample bang-bang for your buck with tassels alight and fire dancing along her arms, and an elegiac, melancholic trapeze act by Oliver Smith-wellnitz ramps up the drama.

House band The Fear provide the industrial rock soundtrack in the shadows but get their po-faced moment in the spotlight on Ich Liebe Das Emoji with their deadpan delivery of suggestive images, while Dieter relishes the innuendo on the turbo-charged operatics of Lick My Pussy and leads the assembly in a closing carousal. Like other alternative variety shows, the Little Death Club turns out to be more than the sum of its parts, if not much more. FIONA SHEPHERD

Until tomorrow.today8pm. Underbelly Bristo Square (Venue 302)

JJJJ

“Am I a genius? Or writing the same joke over and over again?” ponders Myq Kaplan some way into his show. Though, of course, the two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. This excellent debut, from an already established comic Stateside, grasps towards metaphysical profundity while also being deeply, stupidly silly. And it’s to Kaplan’s huge credit that there’s so little showiness in his often masterful display of wordplay and logic-bending musings.

The New York-based comic can wring a satisfying routine merely out of the process of conveying that someone’s occupying a public toilet. He offers some observations on the differences between his liberal home city and the Deep South that based on personal experience, largely favours the latter. Yet through the inexplicable enshrinement of gun culture, he arrives at a succession of arguments about death, challenging widely held truisms by reiterating that it’s a zero sum game, while extolling the unlikely upsides of that.

His routine on Nickelback is particularly memorable, elevating the rock knuckledraggers to a status of consideration they hardly merit, something he accomplishes with understated panache.

Comparing his comedy to the film Inception, the topsyturviness of his gumption is impressive, the cerebral quality maybe supported by his experiments with the hallucinogen ayahuasca, facilitating his more extreme flights of fancy.

Despite the breadth and depth of these, the show is tightly structured, his expanded consciousness perhaps allowing him to see more clearly how everything fits together, because everything here locks in exceptionally neatly.

With superior puns, measured pacing and pleasingly clipped diction on words like “gnocchi”, Kaplan is a compelling listen despite his intensity, which invariably extends to deconstructing his work as he goes, his entire, idiosyncratic existence an elaborate joke that he happily pulls on the threads of.

JAY RICHARDSON

Until 26 August. Today 9:15pm.