James Acaster – Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999

English comic James Acaster artfully pulls together three stories of heartbreak, rejection and humiliation in his MICF Award-winning show, Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999.

Acaster waited on the stage as the sellout crowd swarmed into the venue, dressed in the same bright blue jacket and sunnies as his promo photos. As he paced the stage, glaring, he intermittently fiddled with an iPod, to endlessly play and replay – like we all have in the midst of a break-up – the same song, Paul Williams' Euroleague. 

At first Acaster presents a hardened version of himself, different to the ‘undercover cop’ character portraits of his last handful of shows, later Netflix specials, which were compiled as Repertoire last year. On stage, he rails at his audience of “nerds”, wishing that next year, just a handful will remain, such is the ‘edginess’ of his new hour.

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The hour sees Acaster tell the story of the worst year of his life, 2017, albeit not an altogether bad year, in that he still releases a book and cops that Netflix deal, because as a “white, straight, able-bodied, middle-class man” it can’t get that bad. 

Rather than going deep into the break-up that kicks off a possibly prank mental breakdown – if we are to believe his agent – we instead spend much of the show labouring on one from 2012, where the punchline is so pronounced, so perfect, it, like the show as a whole, moves swiftly from distressing to hilarious.  

Acaster garners gasps of recognition from his crowd when he pulls out vulnerable one-liners that offer insight into mental health, loneliness and embarrassment. That sounds like it wouldn’t be funny, but it absolutely is, heightened by the innate physicality of Acaster’s style. 

Over the course of the show, he weaves together this new persona with tales of therapy sessions gone too right, shitting himself in a steakhouse, and the woeful unprofessionalism of his former agent, to tell the story of a man learning how to cope with rejection, and more importantly, how to do the rejecting himself. Even if that means, temporarily, yet repeatedly, rejecting his wimpy audience. 

Performed as part of Sydney Comedy Festival