The Age - ‘Different Now’ at Melbourne International Comedy Festival

Review by John Bailey

There can be a dark undercurrent to comedy double acts – a sense of tension, jealousy, even hatred simmering beneath the onstage camaraderie. It’s a spiritual booster shot, then, to catch a duo whose genuine friendship seems to spill off the stage.

It’s what allows Annie and Lena to deliver machine-gun banter while seeming so off-the-cuff, and this amiability makes it easy to forget that the two are essentially sketch comics. It’s a surprise every time you realise they’ve seamlessly switched from stand-up to absurd set-piece.

Their style is millennial casual, and their fascinations appropriately relatable: weaponised incompetence, unsolicited advice, having to ask your workplace if you still work there. A 21st birthday speech opens with the Webster’s Dictionary definition of a slut, and a game show challenges a 30-year-old to make a single decision.

The pair are willing to probe murkier waters, and a “funny or upsetting?” round of revelations is both. There’s never any danger of floundering, though, with this pair’s irrepressible buoyancy.

3 Stars