Wes Zaharuk is a man with experience. He has taken his baffling comedy antics all over the world and it shows in this slick performance.
It is equally clear, however, in the tiredness of the routine. There are bad tricks and bad jokes often in the same breath: ‘I’m going to make this cloth disappear,’ he says, ‘like my first wife.’ Some more impressive moments – dressing in a shirt and waistcoat by wriggling through a black tube, or revealing an audience member’s card inside his trousers – are so surrounded by chaos that they seem less remarkable. The latter occurred while he was being wrapped in blue tape to tango music.
Canadian Zaharuk’s main asset is his relationship with the audience. From the outset he is excellent at working the crowd to get them to go along with his zaniness, even when it involves him firing toilet roll in the face of one of them with a wind machine. This was just one of countless unusual props used by Zaharuk in his short set, also including a hoover, a hair dryer and, of course, a banana.
It is tempting to say that the half hour that Zaharuk gives us leaves the audience wanting more, but in reality he is astute and knows when enough is enough. This is an often entertaining and totally bizarre string of events but on the whole it is too tired to be effective.
