Review: Evan Desmarais – Pizza & Ice Cream

The seasoned comic has a seemingly preternatural ability to engage with his punters and coax them into the show

★★★
comedy review (adelaide) | Read in About 1 minute
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Evan Desmarais
Published 15 Feb 2020

Evan Desmarais, hailing from Toronto but currently based in Manchester, has returned once again to the Adelaide Fringe to serve up his brand of gross-out, pseudo-enlightened, adults-only humour.

Desmarais' strength is his crowd work. In the modest Squeaker venue, he is able to immediately get the small crowd on side. He has a seemingly preternatural ability to sense how comfortable his punters are, and gently coax them into the show. And he keeps the energy high, eliciting peals of laughter with his roster of jokes on reiki retreats, awkward threesomes and male baldness.

The title of the show refers to Desmarais’ favourite foods – all of which he now can’t eat because of his recently-diagnosed lactose intolerance. He details at length the inherent risk of buttered popcorn and brioche buns and their potential scatological consequences. This obsession with bodily functions, and how they can go awry, dominates Desmarais’ set and places his brand of humour solidly in the comedy-after-dark category.

But it also undermines the sentimentality of his storytelling. While his material consistently lands, the ‘fuck boi who found truest love’ narrative doesn’t quite resonate in the midst of all the penis jokes.