I’m all for standup that feels ahead of the curve. But what to make of Rhys Nicholson, who spends the first half of their Wednesday night show referring to us as a Thursday night audience? This is comedy that’s not so much in-the-moment as 24 hours ahead of it. But it’s easy to forgive the slip, because the comic (and Drag Race Down Under judge) delivers a fine standup set here, which won the Melbourne comedy festival’s main award in 2022.
As the title Rhys! Rhys! Rhys! implies, the set makes no bones about its main subject: our host themself. Bow tied, hair dyed and sharp suited, the fastidious 33-year-old is here to talk about life as a queer person experiencing early-onset middle age. They’re contemplating marriage and parenthood while friends – to Nicholson’s wicked delight – are starting to divorce. The discomfort of the modern straight male offers another source of sharp satisfaction, even as Nicholson makes new discoveries about their own gender identity.
All of this is delivered in a camp and sometimes caustic tizz from a comic who plays amused, sometimes confused, observer of their own foibles as well as everyone else’s. Social behaviour (teenage boys watching porn together; straight men reacting to a gay man at the gym) is observed through a quasi-anthropological lens. The unfathomable self-confidence of the generation below Nicholson’s is conjured, very funnily, by their story of spying on a young couple queueing for the restaurant loo.
Nicholson’s alarm at that eavesdropped dialogue may be as close as the show brings us to real feeling. But if the Aussie remains at an arch remove from their own life, that distance affords a droll perspective, on “adorable homophobia”, “legacy weddings”, “life barnacles”, and a handful of other neat comic concepts that help them classify their queer, cosy but questing existence. Maybe the material on porn at the end feels cheaper than what’s gone before – and second-hand too, with one lurid act-out salvaged from Nicholson 2014’s show Eurgh. It’s a gig that starts one day ahead and ends nine years ago, but rarely feels less than sparklingly here and now.
• Tonight at the Wardrobe, Leeds, then touring.
