Adam Hills

Audience banter is one of the hardest things to get right in standup, but affable Australian comic Adam Hills has always been one of its stronger practitioners. This year, he’s decided that he doesn’t need a "show" as such, just a few stories to fall back on "if it all goes to shit." But the focus of the hour will be on us, the audience, in an attempt to prove that we’re every bit as interesting as the preening celebrities who so often dominate our attention at the Fringe. If he can get away with it, the show will be 100 per cent banter, zero per cent "material".

That Hills manages this for the first half hour speaks volumes for his skill as a comedian. Bringing certain audience members up on stage, he good-heartedly probes their quirks and foibles, welcoming quips from the aisles that many a lesser comic would pounce upon for fear of being upstaged. When the written material does come, the focus is on the innate decency and good humour of his fellow human beings – like the Italian-Australian pizza takeaway owner who once gave him, an ordinary punter, the kind of bespoke service you’d expect to be reserved for minor royalty. Almost as an afterthought, the last ten minutes of the show becomes a sort of AGM for a charity fundraising project that Hills hopes to develop with his audiences over the course of the month. The result is an open, democratic and genuinely feel-good show that cements Hills’ reputation as a populist comic par excellence.