Review of “The Bisexual’s Lament”: Diary of Despair with 69 Laughs

The year 2023 was the worst of Lou Wall’s life, they tell us, at the start of a set recently shortlisted for this year’s Melbourne comedy festival award. But The Bisexual’s Lament isn’t about the trauma, says Wall, it’s about the recovery, which came courtesy of their commitment to finding the comedy in every tragedy. Such is the mantra in an hour that folds in PowerPoint, found online content, family snaps and sung/spoken “musical comedy” to relate 12 rocky months in the life of the Australian comic.

You can see why there’s buzz around the show: there’s a skit, about selling a bed on Facebook Marketplace, that hits very big early on. Here as elsewhere, Wall plots their comedy to a beat that demands a laughter response – even when the content barely merits it. Their songs are more like rap or rhythmic spoken word, propelling us through sometimes thin material with a smiling upbeat energy – such as the forward propulsion the standup brings to the list of 69 things that make them laugh, and which saved their life in a year of breakup, eviction and sexual assault. Thank goodness they did, but that can’t elevate the comic quality of these second-hand online videos (some already well-worn), AI-generated images and, er, photos of Wall’s mum wearing sunglasses.

I felt as if I was watching a live (queer, millennial) version of Wall’s compatriot Clive James’s TV shows, where he recycled wacky screen content for lols. Happily, there’s more to The Bisexual’s Lament than this, as Wall turns their struggle to rent a Sydney flat, and a text transaction with a voice fetishist, into audiovisual set-pieces that elicit laughs, gasps and “yas queen” cheers in equal measure. The best of these is another SMS exchange, hilariously dysfunctional, with the buyer of their secondhand bed.

The plummet in humour is precipitous from this to Wall’s later sections, which showcase unexceptional videos and correspondence with their not-noticeably-funny family (see Wall’s schoolteacher mum’s texts about farting in class). Like their rollercoaster year, then, the show is up and down – but there’s lots in it, some of which makes a big impression.