Doug Anthony Allstars
Space

The Hot Bagels
The Cabbage Brothers
Club Foote

The Doug Anthony Allstars have always had a rancid little stage act. Looking like three unsavoury prefects from a dubious boarding school or, maybe, Mormons on glue, the DAA’s work on the cusp of bad taste and have a rapport with audiences that borders on harassment.

The group – Tim, Richard and Paul – originally from Canberra, have recently finished a tour of Tasmania. Maybe it was being in that land of contrasts that has finally curdled them. Whatever it is, the Doug Anthony Allstars have been going places so fast, it is hard to tell these days where they are coming from.

They were always big on physical disability jokes and looked to American TV evangelists for their material, but in their recent show, Limbo Hell Akimbo, the perilous mix of their comedy isn’t funny any more. For one thing, their formula is really starting to show and for another, if you put yourself out there at edge city you can’t just be OK, you’ve got to be good.

When the world became too much with Lenny Bruce he started reading from Supreme Court transcripts, when it does for Spike Milligan he checks into a quiet corner of the clinic. The Doug Anthony’s comedy – if it is world-weary and not just complacency and an arts degree – has no ideological centre of gravity. Instead, the three performers seem to be laughing behind their hands at audiences who have paid honest money to see them.

Perhaps the shift to mainstream audiences, like the one in the Space, has meant that the DAA’s no longer have the peer group pressure of the Fringe to consider. At any rate, the result is comedy which is lame and vicious – the Irish Moslems have the shiite kicked out of them (yawn), Laurie Anderson has a Superman orgasm and there’s a lot of the, now very old, Pythons trick of making absurd conceptual combinations – Neil Diamond and Cartesian logic, and people with names like Elvis Kafka and Trotsky the Baptist. The Dougs ask who has heard of Joe Orton and sing If I had a Hammer, then follow with a clunker about Roy Orbison that they say was only to test the room. Well, the room certainly got testy.

We got the usual rubber gloves gags and a medley from Jesus Christ Superstar rather like a black mass in the dorm – lots of emission jokes when Judas hangs himself and Benny Hill-level campery with I Don‘t Know How to Love Him. They performed I Heard it on the Grapevine just to show they really can sing and (insight of insights) sang Bob Dylan’s Sara just to show he really can’t.

The all-time low point was when the Doug Anthonys began sneering at a “hippie” at the front table for having shoulder-length hair. They not only shouldn’t have started but they didn’t know where to get off either. I’d say they were very fortunate he didn’t shiv all three of them. “This is more fun than Gilligan’s lsland,” Tim Ferguson wittered during the show. I wouldn’t have said so.

Club Foote has been keeping up the good work with a two week season of Melbourne’s Hot Bagels and Cabbage Brothers.

The Bagels opened the batting with their now familiar repertoire of rather studied parodies – PMT, Bikini Triangle, Gino, The Morning After and so on. They perform them with panache bur theirs is a closely rehearsed act and if they get slightly out of step they don’t rally easily.

The Stage personas of Janina, Libby, Anna and Lena, remain clear but a bit freeze-dried and when Libby breaks out with her ode to footy or some unscheduled comic abuse, the effect is often more tentative than it should be.

The high-points still work though – What’s Love Got to Do With It: “Love’s just a secondary infection/ it’s a disease and there is no protection”, Anna’s version of Piaf’s Je ne regrette rien (sung with Libby’s accompanying translation, which includes lines like ‘Kill all the baby seals’) and the S&M anthem, Rawhide.

The Hot Bagels found new fans and revived old ones with fresh songs like Criminal Justice and the purple-to-blue Mills and Boon saga of Crystal and the Burnside Mechanic. They also took time to promote their namesakes at theBagel Boys’ shop in Goodwood.

And then there was Cabbage. The brothers Patrick, Louie, Richard and Paul crooned their way through the Twenties and Thirties songs they know and love – Accentuate the Positive, TipToe Through the Tulips, Old Shep, I’ve Got You Under My Skin, Temptation, Your Cheating Heart, ]ealousy and That Old Black Magic.

In among it, one went berserk with a gun, another with a duck, Louie practised voodoo on Richard and Patrick totally lost control of the Casio. They worked their way through a relaxed, stylish and winningly funny first set. “Remember the more you drink, the funnier we get,” they announced at the break and then performed a second half that would have been hilarious on rainwater. The Cabbage Brothers continue to be musically suave and fun to watch.

The final number with the Hot Bagels – You Are a Child of the Universe, (with the very deadpan Paul Cabbage reciting lines from the · Desiderata) and a stomping version of Hit the Road Jack – brought the show to a great finish. A good night’s work from eight persons named Moe.

“Not Half Funny” The Adelaide Review, No.60, February, 1989, p.27.