If you watch too many horror movies, you might get a little unnerved when you enter the darkened sanctum that is ACMI’s Swinburne Studio to witness an array of (admittedly cardboard) tombstones erected on stage. If so, perhaps you’ll scream when Mexican-Venezuelan-American comedian Lara Ricote emerges from the shadows, pre-show, in a Wuthering Heights-like floaty white robe that seems destined to get bloody.
If you do, you’ll look a little silly.
Ricote may exude a certain out-there energy, but she’s no phantom of the comedy festival. Working the room with her amiably oddball charm, she asks each of our names in a near-full house, her trademark cartoonish voice (she points it out herself, and that it has nothing to do with her being deaf) making her sound, for all the world, like she’s a character from The Simpsons.
Turns out her unusual attire is actually baptism garb because – very on trend for our Easter Sunday review spot – we’re about to experience a resurrection of sorts. Making like it’s an episode of UK gameshow Countdown (not to be confused with the beloved Molly Meldrum’s musical alternative), she asks us to pluck a series of vowels and consonants from our minds as Little Tiny Wet Show (baptism) begins for real with us collectively renamed (dubiously so, in our bad luck). So begins a complete life cycle that lasts the length of an almost-hour-long show involving a light dusting of audience participation, but only if you offer yourself willingly. After all, if she’s here to make us laugh, isn’t it only fair and balanced that we return the favour?
What does it take to maintain a healthy relationship? Whether it’s with us, the audience, her opposites attract parents (who she reckons should prob divorce), or the boyfriend of four years she convinced to join her in the Netherlands, only to prance around the world touring with her comedy shows, we’ll hear a variety of clashing answers.
That’s because Ricote, like her mother, reserves the right to change her mind within moments and then deny she ever said anything different. It’s a funny and surprisingly subtle bit that shows how much is going on under the surface of Ricote’s surface-zany act, replete with mangled lyrics from The Beatles and the hope of a collab with “Mrs Elliott”.
Winning Best Newcomer at the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe for her debut GRL/LATNX/DEF, Ricote knows how to maximise her dark-leaning, exceedingly surreal and occasionally confronting humour. She relishes in exaggerated ticks (both facial and otherwise, in one particularly bizarre joke), prancing poses and a deft handle on holding a bit uncomfortably long. But it’s all underpinned with smart commentary on unrealistic expectations placed on women, on relationship status and the pass-agg nature of her therapist, who suggests her commitment issues are all about having bead curtains for doors when she was a kid.
Whatever made Ricote who she is, her oddball musings on the wolves we all contain within us (not in a werewolf horror movie way) are remarkably good at sinking their teeth into you. And that is worth being reborn in her image.
Little Tiny Wet Show (baptism) is playing at ACMI until April 21 and tickets are available here.
