<p>The Doug Anthony All Stars are veterans in their field, drawing some of the Comedy Festival’s biggest crowds. </p>
The Doug Anthony All Stars are veterans in their field, drawing some of the Comedy Festival’s biggest crowds. Their fan base is loyal and mostly middle-aged. It’s been a few decades since the DAAS were in their prime – the young, cheeky threesome that sang delightfully crude songs. While they may have aged and changed a bit, they are very much still the profane, topical and quick-witted rascals that bantered and joked on stage years ago.
Flacco has replaced Richard ‘Dick Fiddler’ Fidler in this reunion tour and he’s a great addition to the team, saying little, but producing plenty of laughs. Paul McDermott still sings beautifully and I could hear women in line talking about how dreamy he still is thirty years later. Tim Ferguson, struggling with multiple sclerosis, is wheelchair bound, but maintains a big stage presence. He runs through the catalogue of drugs he is on with a smile, while Paul suggests he shelves Beroccas and makes his bum look like an orangutan with rabies.
The show goes for over two hours, but the audience calls them back out for an encore. Paul and Tim bounce off each other, seemingly improvising some of their funniest lines and evidently having a great time on stage.
They touch on Rolf Harris and Cardinal Pell, they touch on 9/11 and terrorism, they touch on pre-loved sex toys and unusual sexual fetishes that I don’t need to repeat. In short, it’s a cacophony of profanity and the audience loves it. Paul pretends to gauge the audience’s moral limit, but will immediately drop a despicable one-liner with no regard for political correctness.
It’s refreshing, it’s liberating, it’s The Doug Anthony All Stars.