Josh Glanc: Vrooom Vrooom
Monkey Barrel Comedy – The Hive (Venue 313), until 28 August
Josh Glanc has a propensity for big, cartoonish characters, often with a hypermasculinity bordering on toxic that barely masks their extreme, childlike vulnerability. And with a tremendous commitment to silliness, he really throws himself into his shows. But this time round, as well as making musical elements almost universally a feature of his skits, which segue smoothly between one another with little fuss or grandstanding, he’s added real consistency.
From his opening – with the Australian wandering through the crowd offering snacks, the roll-call of goodies gradually forming together into a toe-tapping rock’n’roll number – Glanc’s quality control is superb, everything rich and strange but with a steady baseline of laughs and periodic eruptions of hilarity.
In tennis whites and with his retro, almost prop-looking moustache, he offers an upbeat, anthemic tune extolling that It’s Great To Be Here!, which feels authentic and really sets the abiding, joyful mood of the hour.
A long distance haulier’s self-defining, vocational pride in his truck is amusing enough, the rapid lyrical density oddly mesmeric, until his blinkered confidence evaporates, the song evolving into an apparently schizophrenic self-romance. Another highlight among many is a commercial for a Christmas album, the character’s enthusiastically hard-sell, slightly sibilant voice mangling the names of the pop hits. But then wonderfully, he is suddenly stripped of Yuletide cheer as he engages in a phone conversation with an ex-lover.
Elsewhere, a relatively straight song about a lonely tree, admittedly performed in a tree costume, is a nice change of mood. Throughout, Glanc’s crowd interaction is masterful, carefully scripted with some great gags but allowing him enough scope to be loose so that he can make the performance feel special. When he self-consciously marvels that he's 37 and used to be a lawyer it is with a flicker of self-reproach. Yet law’s loss is undoubtedly comedy’s gain.