Steve Hughes: Big Issues

Steve Hughes is a cynical, cantankerous, paranoid, over-intellectual, anti-establishment, rough-as-guts, Metal-loving Aussie bloke, and we love him for it. He stands onstage next to a table topped with two beers (by the end of the hour he's drunk them both). “Hello up the back of the pyramid,” he says to the crowd, which rises up high above him in the tall upstairs of the Forum, “I'm surprised you're allowed up there with all the 'h' and 's' regulations.” And then in a smarmy, prissy voice, “It's a bit steep, you might slip and fall down and become a paedophile.” Laughs erupt. Hughes is not on board with anything that restricts our freedom to think for ourselves. “I don't suit Australia.  I don't even look it. I look like some kind of Hungarian Jew.” And he does.

Hughes's show is a wild ride, touching on everything from the mile high club (as a tall man, Hughes thinks it's ridiculous) to political correctness (he also thinks it's ridiculous). It's very funny, and at times makes us question the very fabric of our democracy: “This mushroom will make you turn blue and drop dead in 10 seconds. Is it illegal? Nup. What about that one? Yep. How come? It's magic.”