Bryony Kimmings: Sex Idiot

Overview

Five minutes into Sex Idiot I had to put my reviewer’s pad and pen away — halfway through scribbling the immortal lines “pre-cum doesn’t count”. Bryony Kimmings has brought Melbourne a show that’s so tender, sly and warm that it’s impossible to look away.

It’s a deceptively simple premise: Kimmings gets an STI test, discovers a common sexual disease and gets in contact with her former partners. On the surface it might sound like a familiar formula; the kind of narrative that’s convenient to market and even easier to hang jokes on. But Kimmings stretches the stale traditions of stand-up in every direction at once, making a work that straddles (and grinds) the line between comedy and her background in performance art.

She wrings the story through so many different styles and costume changes with a delivery that oscillates so quickly between mock seriousness and devastating confession that we’re left reeling. The responses to emails from her partners are bound up in anecdotes about each lover, before she rebirths each in song, dance or movement. At some points the unspoken, physical narrative that pours unspoken from Kimmings’ body is so breathtaking that it’s easy to forget you’re watching a comedy. But that’s the beauty of Sex Idiot — by embracing the tragedies bound up in sex and love the show becomes as true to life as it is funny.

Moreover, though most comedians like a bit of audience involvement — whether it’s making fun of punters for coming in late or inviting heckles from the floor — Kimmings leaves them all for dead in Sex Idiot’s inevitable climax. After inviting audience members to harvest their pubes, she gathers them all up and sticks them to her face as a prop moustache. See? Impossible to look away. Unmissable at this year's comedy festival.

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