Celia Pacquola’s stand-up show Delayed is now available on DVD as part of ABC2’s Warehouse Comedy Festival series, for those who missed it on the festival circuit throughout 2012.
On the surface, Delayed is about Pacquola’s long distance relationship during her two-year stint in London. According to her disclaimer, Delayed is not an attempt to make stories from an overseas trip interesting; there are no slides, it’s not an adventure story, nor is it a geography lesson. It’s also not the clichéd travel story trope of ‘discovering one’s self’. Instead, it is a spin on the ‘hero’ archetype and journey – albeit a pop cultural version of it.
Pacquola’s background is largely as a comedy writer, and in an interview as seen in the DVD extras, she feels she is still new to stand-up. While she maybe new, she is a confident and natural performer, despite – or perhaps because of – her ‘geekiness’ and awkwardness. It is this ‘geek girl’ persona that Pacquola has based this performance around, and at times you sense that she is far too intelligent for this pose – there is a sense of sarcasm that runs just underneath the surface. Some may see it as self-depreciating, but it’s self-depreciation that the audience identifies with.
Delayed is straightforward stand-up, with some self-taught bad dancing to start proceedings, and a well-executed dramatization of her ‘hero’ moment at the story’s end. It is also stand-up that is well written – a layered and loosely plotted ‘long distance relationship’ story which serves as the backbone for jokes about an odd sort of patriotism, the competition that couples engage in, and the ultimate back-handed insult given to her during a drunken pub conversation. The jokes that are set up in one story are paid off two stories later in some instances, and this continual, circular way of storytelling throughout the piece is clever, and quite funny.
As the story evolves, it becomes more about human foibles than love, more about the power of storytelling than the power of travel. Pacquola’s take on the travel theme is a clever angle in which to approach it.
If anything, Pacquola may have unintentionally created The High-Five Society.
ABC2 presents Warehouse Comedy Festival
Celia Pacquola – Delayed
Live Directors: Peter Ots and Jon Olb
Australia, 2012, 65 mins
DVD Extras: Behind the Scenes interview; stand-up from ROVE.
Out now through Madman Entertainment
Rated MA
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