If you are looking for a show to bring your mum to this Melbourne International Comedy Festival, probably don't pick this one. Nina Oyama is not a gentle or family-friendly comedian. What she is, though, is filthy, whip-smart and screamingly funny.
"How many of you know me from Twitter?" she asks the audience, and from the cheers in the room, quite a few of them do. One of those who know her from Twitter is right-wing Sky News commentator Chris Kenny, who devoted a segment on his show to denouncing her Twitter feed and comedy segments on, of course, the ABC. Kenny, in one of the best self-owns I've seen on Sky in a while, read out some of her filthy tweets, demurely eliding over the swear words.
The segment introduced her to some of Kenny's conservative fanbase, who went after Oyama with depressingly predictable vitriol, including death threats. But Oyama has turned the horrible experience into a show, a version of which she's now performing at MICF. And there are few things funnier than watching her incredulity as Kenny reads aloud: "Malcolm Turnbull had his spine surgically removed so he can suck his own dick." "That was on the news!" shrieks Oyama incredulously, playing the clip at her show.
The show was written mostly about that very odd attack, but she's modified it since to include different bawdy stories and a truly side-clutching bit about playing a giant possum on a show on the ABC. Her cadence is born of Twitter: fast, filthy and very funny. She has a slideshow of pictures, as well as clips from Kenny's diatribe, to accompany her points. Watching him squirm over her material is a schadenfreude delight.
But as hilarious as the clip is now, we're pretty sure Kenny's diatribe will not age well. Oyama is one of the funniest comedians in the festival this year, and while she's playing to rooms of 50 now, it won't be long before she's headlining huge rooms. In fact, after selling out her entire run, she's added two new shows in bigger venues. Book tickets to those shows now, so you can say you saw her back when she was starting out.
