Review: ★★★★ Josh Glanc: Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Chamedian (MICF)

Last year's show Manful saw him strapped in a muscle suit and then stripped to his neuroses as Dicky Rosenthal. For Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Chamedian he's traded in high concept character study for surreal millennial vaudeville but remains as delightfully strange as ever.

In Glanc's one-man song and dance, mime and misc variety hour, routines skate into action chaotically and with little to no ado. One second you're watching a band pulled from the audience play invisible instruments for Glanc's intro music, the next he's trying his best and failing to make someone in the front row a banana smoothie. If you close your eyes you can almost hear John Cleese whispering, "And now for something completely different," in the distance.

Last year we said that Glanc has an inhuman ability to let things ride way longer than seems sensible, be it silence, a song, eye contact or a series of hip thrusts. He has endless confidence in his audience and his material and the faith that we'll follow him down whatever curly rabbit hole he's digging, however long it takes to get to the bottom, gives Glanc immense space to waggle his freak flag. Skits regularly start to feel like they're lurching into borrowed time only to leap off the rails completely. Each time he lays a hand on what might be a recently deceased horse it jumps up and bites his fingers off to huge comedic effect.

The gamble doesn't always pay off; a reworked Chili Peppers song about doing the laundry never gets off the ground and drags along for some time, but a first-hand shaggy-dog tale of Aqua's rise to Eurodance supremacy has people gasping. One crowd member near the front actually grabs her own face in an effort plug bubbling "tee-hee"s.

His ability to take fairly naff branches of comedy make them bear fruit is something special as well. He lip-syncs (quickly losing control) and outright serenades us, conducts fumbling and increasingly revealing costume changes in full view of the audience, and even manages to do prop comedy without making it a crutch. His mime-in-crisis bit towards the end is actually the highlight of the show.

You won't learn any profound truths, or gain some great insight into human nature - unless it's something along the lines of 'people are strange'. But there is a good chance you'll giggle 'til you tee-hee.

Josh Glanc presents Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Chamedian until 22 Apr at Melbourne Town Hall, part of the 2018 Melbourne International Comedy Festival.