COMEDY REVIEW: Guy Williams ★★★

 

Guy Williams arrives on stage already furious, and from there things can only get louder. His magnificently unwieldy title, Rich People Are Stealing From You and Blaming Brown People and Trans People and Some People Believe Them Aaahhhhhh!, is less a title than a mission statement; the New Zealand comic intends to spend an hour yelling at the political apocalypse until it gives up.

Williams has perfected a particular kind of anti-establishment rage: The targets are familiar; the right, wealth, racism, reactionary politics, but his willingness to turn the gun on his own side gives the material a pleasingly anarchic edge, and there is craft beneath the apparent chaos. Williams has done his homework, drawing on books and audiobooks in an attempt to understand how the political right acquired such extraordinary momentum. Yet he wisely refuses to turn that research into a lecture. Instead, arguments are punctured by props, visual gags, heckling and sudden eruptions of fury.

The result is messy, repetitive and gloriously unsubtle, as Williams occasionally mistakes volume for escalation. But when the Fringe's polished political comedians threaten to become earnest, his blunt-force catharsis feels oddly refreshing.