Brendon Burns: Dumb White Guy

Disillusioned with mainstream comedy in the UK and Australia, Brendon Burns has been proactive in seeking out new audiences for his provocative standup, seeking to play rooms and forge connections that challenge his comfortable white perspective. Of course, he'd like to be a black comic, that's long been a given even before he voices it on stage. But now he's embroiling himself fully into exploring and countering racial oppression.

While loath to stand up for political correctness—accusing feminism of jumping the shark with some sometimes specious reasoning and more-or-less empirical observations that run counter to liberal orthodoxy—when it comes to Australia's relationship with its Aboriginal population, he's engaged directly with the oppressed. Amidst all of Burns' diatribes about ethnic frictions, for the largely ignorant like myself, it comes as a bit of a jolt to learn just how few rights and opportunities the Aborigines have available to them.

Not that this is a show in danger of growing too worthy or sounding preachy. Burns is open about his own, instinctive racial prejudices, recalling them with the candour of amusing cultural cringe and arguing, persuasively, that we all should be a little bit more honest in our social interactions. He also appreciates the perils of having an affluent white man pontificate on the subject, delivering a twist that makes you understand that Edinburgh is not his end game – and that this is a show that he's readying and honing to launch onto a resistant Australia.