Review: ★★★ Emily Tresidder: No, You Hang Up! (MICF)

16 April 2018 | 4:46 pm | Joe Dolan

"Less like a polished stand-up set and more like a pub catch-up with your funny best mate."

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Emily Tresidder is sick of chip variations, white-boy dreadlocks and mums with too much money. And while she attempts to rid the world of those everyday annoyances, No, You Hang Up! barely begins to scratch the surface.

Tresidder's jokes feel less like a polished stand-up set and more like a pub catch-up with your funny best mate. It's overly casual and often without punchlines, but her charming demeanour is what carries her through. No, You Hang Up! has a sort of millennial YouTube appeal: funny and charismatic, sure, but not necessarily well translated to the stage.

While her ad-libbing and deviations get the crowd on board, much of Tresidder's show goes well off the track of modern irritations. The theme is threaded thinly throughout the show, to the point where it's a wonder as to why Tresidder bothered with it at all. Simply presenting herself as a comic would be enough, as she has proven in the past. But without taking the idea of hang-ups as far as it can possibly go, it just feels like a gimmicky distraction.

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Nonetheless, Tresidder proves she has plenty of potential and more than enough allure as a presence on stage. While her material may not always work by way of crafted joke-telling, she's an accessible and relatable storyteller. Her message to let go of the little things that annoy us rings true and her upbeat personality is the driving force behind the Tresidder brand.

Emily Tresidder presents No, You Hang Up! until 22 Apr at the Imperial Hotel, part of the 2018 Melbourne International Comedy Festival.