Frenchy: Live 'n' Lanky

At one point in Live 'n' Lanky, Australian YouTube sensation-turned-standup Frenchy complains that people will leave his show thinking he does nothing but bully the audience. It's no mystery why.

Ordinarily, this would be damning enough: Frenchy's style of engagement is not subtle, kind or particularly fun to watch. But sometimes, the universe delivers natural justice. At the performance reviewed, the comedian and the crowd generally deserved each other.

Frenchy understandably mocks the belligerent drunk who has forced his way into the show and promptly fallen asleep, before moving on to those incautious enough to sit up front and a few other intoxicated hecklers. He stops along the way to interrogate a teenager about his mother's attractiveness. All this comprises more than half the show. 

Try to imagine what Live 'n' Lanky might be like without its more disruptive onlookers, and you realise the awful truth: a polite audience would be left with nothing but Frenchy's uniformally unpleasant routines and tedious attempts at musical comedy. Without any laddish, whooping idiots to tame, his flaws would only become more apparent.

The toilet humour is constant and unimaginative, as are the rape, paedophilia and incest jokes, but the dominant theme is how crazy, irritating and dishonest women are. One can try to detect traces of irony or self-mockery in this material, but it's a fruitless task. The closest Frenchy comes is an occasional cheeky awareness that he might have said something shocking.

But there are no shocks here, and precious little comedy either.