MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL COMEDY FESTIVAL
DAVID QUIRK – COWBOY MOUTH ★★★★
Melbourne Town Hall
Saturday, April 1

Recordings of women recounting the bizarre dreams they had about David Quirk bookend and punctuate this show, and you can kind of see why someone might dream about him.

His presence is compelling, yet also somehow nonchalant: at one point he admits he has inadvertently omitted a joke, rendering the one at hand incomprehensible. 

Quirk's humour is inventive, dry, thoughtful, and at times philosophical.

The vegan performer casually compares meat-eating to bestiality, and dissects a racist remark to pinpoint which part of it is actually racist.

This may sound preachy or fodder for chin stroking rather than laughter, but the raucous audience prove otherwise.

In one brilliant, self-referential passage, he reads from a script a bit he'd performed earlier, changing just one word, in order to inhabit the mind of a previous audience member who had misheard a joke.

By show's end we've been on a journey through Quirk's own curious mind, and what a ride it's been.