Mel Buttle: Quite Unsavoury

When you watch Mel Buttle perform you know you're in good hands. A few people in the audience are fans from The Great Australian Bake Off, which Buttle hosts with Clare Hooper. But still more seem to be loyal fans from her first appearances at the Comedy festival, or even at open mics and free comedy shows around Brisbane.

It's so cool to see how Buttle has gone from strength to strength since then, and tonight's show is a masterclass in easy hilarity. Even when she seems to wander off topic, it's only to make an even funnier point. She talks about genteel topics like buying a dog, going to Hawaii with her girlfriend and getting stuck with an American obsessed with chatting about gun policy, or her newly single dad's jet ski purchase. She reacts to all this stuff how you might react — a bemused kind of annoyance — but tells every story from an angle that ends up surprising and delightful.

One big surprise came towards the end of the show when she started selling clothes and other stuff that she can't get rid of on Gumtree from the stage. This isn't gimmicky — she's genuinely selling this stuff, and that makes it way funnier, as members of the audience pass $10 notes to the stage for a vintage tennis racket, or two bucks for a treasured childhood bowl. In comedy right now no one seems to want to be likeable — they wanna be confronting and dark. But tonight Buttle shows us all the skill and talent involved in charming a whole room.