Review: Asher Treleaven – Troubadour

Troubadour
Starring: Asher Treleaven
Appearing at: Melbourne Town Hall, for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival

Asher Treleaven is a clown, but an entirely professional one. You can tell he’s a clown from the hats, the bandy gait, and floppy suit. You can tell he’s a professional because of his unerring command of the stage and his precise pacing.

He’s mostly a street performer, though – the troubadour of the title, perhaps. While the show is effectively a set of autobiographical vignettes, he’s pithily tied them together through the use of Edward DeBono’s decision-making gimmick The Six Thinking Hats. Thankfully, the show has little to do with blowhard management gurus. The hats are merely a hook to guide the audience through the show, and it’s a pretty useful tool.

Information, intuition, optimism, creativity; these elements loosely dictate spritely tales of his dual fathers, his calamitous career as a professional mascot, the higher education in circus arts, and a rather disturbing closer about a medical malady that takes us up to now, where the black judgement hat closes the show and he pulls out the old passing-the-hat-around trick if we’ve all enjoyed it.

Clear enough. The best thing about Treleaven is his writing, and his self-awareness. Each gag could take the predictable path but he consistently goes one better with genuinely unexpected (therefore funnier) punchlines. It’s most evident when he quips about a ‘ginger’ kid and immediately acknowledges the “cheap shot”. Many in the comedy fest won’t and don’t.

In addition to the actually clever witticisms, there are a couple of raucous physical set-pieces which capitalise on his slapstick sensibility. It makes for a rounded, satisfying show, despite the tenuous linking of the anecdotes via the hats. But hey, it’s better than jerking here and there, with no narrative arc or thread or hint about where we are in the show.

Troubadour is the first set I’ve seen at this year’s MICF which is for everyone. No subcultural in-jokes. No falling back on subcultural in-jokes either. It’s just straight-up funny; a nicely balanced mix of physical clowning and professional stand-up. If the crowd hadn’t already paid, his begging hat would surely have been overflowing as we filed out.

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