Anyone For Tennis? also reminds me of the times when at 3am and gorged on beer, a group of mates come up with the kind of hilarious rubbish that involves yelling at a dandelion for being selfish. What distinguishes this show from the drunk nonsense-talkers is that AFT? have the rare skill of being hilarious to a sober (but not stonyfaced) MICF crowd.
It’s mystifying as to why this duo has anything to do with tennis, but the headbands work. The white shirts/black jeans outfit, a seemingly ubiquitous outfit for anyone under or around the age of 25, also work. While the voices are sometimes mildly off-key, they are not painfully so. Their best work lies in the lyrics and they don’t seem to be running out of inspiration anytime soon. They launch into a love ballad in Margherita, get warped in a Time Portal In Our Lounge and throw themselves into the raving mad lunacy of Heterosexual. Add in a random costume change or two and the torture-the-audience sequences (often introduced by twin evil grins from the pair), and somehow the Herald Sun’s comparisons to Flight Of The Conchords starts to ring true.
AFT? have a punchy, athletic stage presence, a general lack of pretension and commercial-friendly youthfulness. It’s little wonder the crowd on this night was almost entirely under-30, but there’s no reason why a wider demographic can’t get a kick out of it, as long as they’ve heard songs about menstruation before. AFT is Family Guy meets Flight Of The Conchords with an Aussie twist on the New Zealand phenomenon.
