Not many people would get away with making light of playing heavy metal music before a Welcome to Country, but then again, Ed Gamble isn't many people. He's a man of hysterical contrasts. For example, the British comedian and podcaster may love Slipknot and have the tattoo sleeves to prove it, but his doe-eyed "vicar at a youth camp" face offers up an on-stage incongruity that makes for comedy gold.
This conflicting persona of a middle-class metalhead is the backdrop for Electric, where the comedian vents his frustrations about wanting to cultivate a harder image when the fact is, he is about as edgy as a circle. His opening night at the Athenaeum Theatre saw Gamble fresh off the back of an AFL game where he divulged to his "guinea-pig" audience that he had never toured Austalia nor seen so many "non-ironic mullets" and shoulder-baring "big boys" – a tale accompanied by enough huffs and puffs to turn an asthmatic a whiter shade of pale.
His stories of the gym set the tone for the performance: waggish and deliciously provocative. Whether it was his gag about doing reps for Palestine (the amount he did made him look "pro-Israel"), the fact he had to adopt a diet that looked like Prince Andrew's love life ("pro-tein") to a deep-throat of a microphone, it soon became obvious that the audience was sliced up into the outright amused and the downright appalled.
Like many comedians at this festival, Gamble began to regale stories of lockdown – the 'C' word should be buried in a MICF mausoleum next year – and how he had to cancel his wedding three times. While his stories of hosting his own hen-do for his wife and doing a strip dance while getting ready for bed by the panty-dropper of a name "Oral-D" had a few laughs, the material felt too rehearsed and frankly, a bit passé.
It was the moments when the podcaster went off-script that really made him shine as a class act. He had a natural rapport with the audience (especially one shot-snapping member in the front row), and you wish he had done more ad-lib to see his wit in all its whip-smart glory.
The electrical current in the show began to pulsate when Gamble – surprise, surprise – started speaking about food. His Off Menu podcast with James Acaster has seen him rise to the crème de la crème of the comedy scene, and after Gamble gave a brief (but spot-on) impression of Acaster, he caught the diehard fans' attention – hook, line and sinker.
When it comes to dissecting all things digestible, Gamble stands up tall, which is why the highlight proved to be when he unpacked the politics of a budget hotel breakfast, from the "dog stick" sausages to toast made on a "hamster crematorium". But it was his talk of the liquid/solid eggs and his fictional backstory about 'Maureen', a nonagenarian chicken who never got to cross the road as she was shacked up in a warehouse pumping eggs like cannonry, that had us clucking our way into the coop with laughter.
Gamble is a gifted stand-up, and there's no doubt this edgy circle of a comic is adroit at firing sharp observations and punchy aphorisms to make even the most trivial of things humorous. While some of the material for Electric could do with new batteries, his rambles about heavy metal music and food (his raison d'etre) still spark with energy.
