Review: Becky Lucas – 'Um, Support Me?!'

A talented comic let down by insensitive material

★★★
comedy review (adelaide) | Read in About 1 minute
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Becky Lucas
Published 08 Mar 2019

Becky Lucas is a talented comic with instinctive timing. As the audience is laughing at the punchline, she throws a sucker punch that either floors the crowd or has them howling with more laughter. 

Lucas has great material in 'Um, Support Me?!' despite announcing to the audience that she is using Adelaide Fringe as a testing ground for this new show so what we’re seeing is not a polished work. There are great jokes about that girl from school, being a child of divorce, and some astute commentary on gender equality. What lets this show down, however, is the recurring use of language that stigmatises mental illness and suicide. Sometimes she uses this language casually and other times for an intended comedic effect — but that isn’t really working in the show at the moment.

'Um, Support Me?!' contains some great club material and it is working towards being a great hour of comedy. Lucas has enormous promise and a natural rhythm, but her ability to speak through the contemporary lens of internet culture needs to include less insensitive language if she is to rise to the potential she demonstrates.