The last stand in not-growing-up, Nath Valvo is holding the frontline for all those amongst us who are done shelling out for their brother’s baby monitor, done giving up every weekend to go to yet another blasted wedding, done being pounced on by Aunty Jennifer and asked about our when-not-if offspring.
He embodies what everyone grown-up teenager feels inside.
Families. Families and relationships and growing up. Living life as a twenty-year-old. Being lazy and irresponsible and watching too much Netflix. Eating take out and skipping the gym. Everyone in Valvo’s life wants him to get on with life. Mum wants him to have a baby. His boyfriend wants him to get up before noon. His friends are piling on the pressure for Nath to settle down and get some security. Nath Valvo is having bloody none of it.
With a less personable comedian this material would be the stuff of the sludge heap of Fringe repetitiveness. Your mum is a pain. Girls in clubs are annoying. Cooking food is hard. Friends with babies are selfish. But Valvo has something magical about him, it’s hard to describe quite what but I’m going to take a punt and say that he embodies what everyone grown-up teenager feels inside. A gross sense of self-satisfaction that they are not boring and old, with a ball of fury and bone crushing disappointment in every decision they have made in their too-long-to-still-be-watching-daytime-TV lives. It’s wholly relatable in a fresh way and really very, very funny.
Valvo’s material is the stuff of such universality that it is hard to imagine anyone could not laugh themselves silly at this show. He certainly had our entire audience in fits of giggles. I do not exaggerate that when he made a certain joke about Dads I laughed so hard I was worried I’d pass out from lack of oxygen.
