Jim Jefferies crosses the line in Edmonton
Anyone who made it to one of Jim Jefferies’ two shows at the Jubilee Auditorium on Friday knew they were in for a night of boundary-violating, button-pushing, self-deprecating hilarity.
But how many would have guessed the Australian comedian would make it through his 90-minute performance without mentioning the name “Donald Trump” once? Because he did – and then couldn’t go a whole show without talking about human fecal matter.
It’s child’s play to riff on the absurdity of the American political situation these days – but Jefferies didn’t rely on cliche. He focused on new material. After a too-short but solid opening set from promising comedian Tommy Campbell, Jefferies made his entrance and noted early that most of his act was untested. A lot of it worked very well – and the rest should be left on the cutting room floor.
His ADHD-delivery style of randomly jumping back and forth between topics wouldn’t have worked for lesser comedians, but this guy’s mind, even when addled with a little bit of alcohol (he even looked a bit tipsy), is as sharp as a tack. In rapid succession, he talked about use of eugenics in Scandinavian countries (“given how gorgeous they are, you can’t argue with the results”), Joe Jackson’s poor parenting skills (“you aren’t getting the Jackson 5 with positive reinforcement”) and his recent need to require his sexual conquests to sign five-page non-disclosure agreements prior to intercourse – “And you thought condoms were a mood killer!” With material like this, and more over the course of the evening, Jefferies reinforced his real comedic strength with bitchy, incisive, side-splitting one-liners.
The best comedians tend to cross boundaries of propriety to get laughs. Jefferies walked that line, and crossed it a few times too many. His Australian asshole shtick can make his delivery style too predictable in its edginess; you just know he’s going to say something really offensive – and this probably causes him to venture into subject areas that by 2018 should be taboo, or at least need more of a high road approach to getting laughs.
Bashing his Canadian audience over the head with resoundingly negative opinions of Canada was like killing a mosquito with a sledgehammer. We can laugh at our own shortcomings, but comparing our seasonal woes of long winters-short summers to a woman menstruating 10 months out of 12 was a bit much. Making fun of Canada for its poor weather is like making fun of a handicapped person – which, yes, he also managed to do. He used the term “wheelie” to refer to someone in a wheelchair, and got a couple laughs at the expense of the blind; it made you wonder why his manager hasn’t pulled him aside and told him to cut that part out the act. And while the thankfully brief but still classless Andrew Dice Clay-style insults directed towards French-Canadians may have gone over here in Alberta – which was, frankly, embarrassing – he’s going to need to drop the bit from his set by Winnipeg, which has a sizeable French-Canadian community. They’ll boo his ass off stage.
When Jefferies wasn’t taking a sledgehammer to silly Canadian stereotypes – with no one in the audience seeming to mind – he was capable of using more nuanced approaches. He quite deftly mocked the Canadian tendency of being overly-accommodating to others. He did a hilarious bit on Trudeau’s recent accusation of sexual impropriety from 10 years ago, summing it up with, “Of course he apologized – he’s Canadian!”
You could say that comedians have truly made it when they can go an entire set without a shit joke – and Jefferies is not quite there yet. His almost 10-minute tale of “shitting his pants” while on a date with a control-freak former girlfriend was just filler near the end of the show. Given the preponderance of fresher material sprinkled throughout the night, he’s capable of writing a lot better stuff than that. That’s the thing about tests. Sometimes you fail.
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