Back again for his fourth time at the Edinburgh Fringe, Australian Rhys Nicholson’s fast-paced, intelligent wit has his audience engaged from the get go. With a smattering of confetti and some very awkward stories about his formative years, audiences can expect to spend a very entertaining hour in Nicholson’s company.
Though much of his humour is based around sex jokes and drunken misadventures, there is a rather more serious backbone to the performance
Nicholson is a seemingly natural comic. In Bona Fide he takes on an array of topics including coming out to his friends, getting drunk as a teen, getting drunk as an adult, lying, airports and wanking. None of these are particularly fresh ground for a comedian to cover, but Nicholson handles each subject expertly, gaining long laughs from his audience and getting certain members of the crowd to publicly admit rather more than they probably expected to. Each anecdote he tells is well chosen and hilarious. In particular, his story about his mother’s reaction to the time he called her a rather bad word was a special delight, and told in excruciatingly painful detail.
Though much of his humour is based around sex jokes and drunken misadventures, there is a rather more serious backbone to the performance. Same sex couples still can’t legally marry in Australia. And as a gay man, Rhys would rather like to have had the option. Rhys informs his audience that during Australian civil marriage ceremonies couples actually have to announce to their well wishers that marriage “is the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others”. Rhys has some rather wonderful things to say about the absurdity of this. His show is thoughtfully peppered with witty and occasionally catty quips surrounding Australia’s outdated marriage laws, as Rhys discusses various friend’s romantic entanglements as well as his own 6 year long relationship.
The ending of his set brings this theme of discussion to a rather hilarious, but also lovely and hopeful conclusion, which I’m not going to spoil. You’ll have to go see it for yourself.
