If you want to seize this word dork’s attention, then lassoing me with the line, “Tie me up and make me your subordinate clause,” is a sure-fire way to do it. Comedian Louisa Fitzhardinge trills with deceptively wholesome pep in her only occasionally saucy show Comma Sutra. But that aforementioned mischevious line is a good indicator of the chaotic good energy you can expect from the snappy, 60-minute show. The only moment it sails way past outré is the rather eye-opening, “If you can use a colon you can put your cock in mine.”
As the name suggests, the show is a gleefully cheeky parting of Oxford comma supporters from its detractors (half and half in the audience on the night we attended, but Fitzhardinge’s a fan, for the record). As accompanied by a sharp-suited Greg Lavell on the piano, she was born to make this superlative show. Joking about the uselessness of her combined arts degrees – German language and musical theatre – she clearly gets her kicks mining translation hiccups, guffaw-inducing bad dad jokes, geeky recollections of a lonely childhood and an obsessive focus on grammatical pedantry. Her ideal man would be translucent from lack of outdoor activity, she overshares.
It’s a hoot, with gloriously witty sing-song lines and more than a few hilarious visual cues, including a handy lesson on the surprisingly similar Auslan signs for boat and vagina, the confusion of which would surely startle a deer. Wearing a snazzy red dress and tights adorned with ampersands, Fitzhardinge holds the audience wrapped in the palm of her precision punctation hands. Onlookers shriek along.
Fitzhardinge knows the material inside out. Comma Sutra started out as a ten-minute sketch performed at the Butterfly Club some seven years prior. It’s been to the Edinburgh Festival and back since then, and toured all over Australia, garnering rave reviews along the way. It’s easy to see why, as we’re lucky enough to soak up her 100th performance back home where it all began in the intimate surrounds of the Carson Place venue.
Letting us in on her scandalously cheating ways, her reworking of Gotye and Kimbra classic ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’ to reveal why she ditched French for German is a clear highlight, as is a segue on the German language’s business-like mashing up of words: grief bacon for the extra weight you pick up in emosh moments like lockdown, anyone? Or breast warts for nipples?
I won’t spoil the closing number, suffice it to say that it’s a rare example of audience participation working out more awks for the performer than for the audience members corralled. Fabulous fun.
