Demi Lardner: Birds With Human Lips

Demi Lardner can't leave her house. She hasn't in three days, and the walls (or, to be more specific, an imaginary warthog) are starting to talk.

Thus begins our insight into the life and mind of the Aussie newcomer who landed herself Mebourne's 2013 Raw Comedy award at all of 19-years-old. It takes us no time at all to clock that her hype has been well-earned; while a few moments of Birds are reminiscent of fellow Aussie semi-absurdists like Sam Simmons, Lardner has a voice all her own. She sidesteps millennial stand-up cliches like online dating for perfectly delivered illustrations of her own strangeness. She lingers on bits which clearly worked better in planning than in performance (the OCD sex pest), but makes up for them with succinct moments of startling genius (crisp-packet-hand-holding).

How Lardner became so polished while flying under the radar for as long as she did is totally beyond us – her delivery is smooth without seeming overly practiced, and her barometer for the audience's unease is finely tuned. She manoeuvres through the sadder details of her upbringing (primarily her mother's child-rearing anger-stroke-indifference) into an addictive, semi-psychadelic whimsy. It seems incomprehensible that a 20-year-old could be so artful in articulating their neuroses without venturing into angst, but Lardner is clearly anything but predictable.

At forty minutes, Birds flies by. And while we'd love to end on a slightly bang-ier bang—we never really understand why she hasn't been able to leave her house in the first place—we're just happy to have stepped into her Technicolor mindscape.