Every Ting Or No Ting - Adelaide Fringe Review

Every Ting Or No Ting - Adelaide Fringe Review

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Posted 2023-03-01 by Jon Cocksfollow

Wed 01 Mar 2023 - Sat 04 Mar 2023


Singaporean-born Ting Lim is based in Australia and is developing a reputation as one of the hottest up-and-coming comedians on the circuit. Her one-hour set at Alley Cat in the Rhino Room did plenty to underscore that recommendation. Ting is dry like a good martini and admits to being a latter-day Python aficionado, for like Python's Piranha Brother Doug, she uses sarcasm: dramatic irony, bathos, puns, hyperbole, litotes and satire.

Ting arrives onstage in the Rhino Room's Alley Cat as if settling into a bus ride with friends, without missing the opportunity to observe that – unlike this one - most performance spaces were larger than your average Australian toilet. Her delivery is relaxed, yet studded with natural punchlines, a voice of modern Gen Y Asian-Australian a little bemused by modern life's ironies, but never not amused by them. During her formative years spent in Singapore, she learnt to navigate a passage through the societal strictures governing behaviour and just as she had mastered the basics, her life brought her to Australia and a whole different set of rules.

Like a natural conversationalist, she engages the audience with the rhetorical question on any given aspect of modern living, drawing on audience experience to affirm her delivery, gaining laughs from the ordinary while artfully and succinctly skating along the lines dividing eloquent social commentary and hilarity in the form of f-word-laden diatribe. The sudden appearance of the f-bomb amid otherwise somewhat elevated matter is usually bang-on target and the laughs flow naturally.

Via observations on the banal and ordinary that somehow become greater than the sum of their parts, Ting's set walks us with a knowing smile through the end of civilisation as we know it. Deft references to the strictures of unemployment against amusing allusions to being a neither-crazy-nor-rich Asian reveal a journeywoman just making her way through life, like the rest of us. In doing so she quietly highlights societal inequities in a way refreshing and devoid of angst-laden rhetoric. The end of the world is never explicit.

Ting is a-political in that she observes and exposes with a smile, un-racist as she gently walks us through her side of life's garden and generously forgiving of a first-world society so wrapped in its own outside-world indifference that she calls herself Tina when ordering coffee so as not to confuse the barista. But even that has been too much for some of them. 'Tina' begets 'Gina' on the cardboard cup and Ting is a non-existent entity. But she finds it funny and so do we.

The show is called Every Ting and No Ting, a clever play on words and, ironically, her name. In walking us through life's day-to-day banalities, its inequities and ironies, its annoyances and frustrations, she touches on just about everything while on the face of it saying nothing. But the smile on her face says plenty as she wraps the show, leaving us wanting more. See the show if you can; the only remaining tickets are for March 1 and 2.

#march
#adelaide_city
#comedy
#festivals
#performing_arts
#shows
!date 01/03/2023 -- 04/03/2023
%wnadelaide
105098 - 2023-06-12 11:41:20

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