Megasquirt: Fully Loaded review – how to combat existential angst? A comedy rave at an ungodly hour
‘How to feel whole in an empty world?” There are many possible answers to that question, and Megasquirt’s late-night comedy rave workshops a good few of them. But there’s probably no better way than putting on a banging show and performing it to an adoring audience of your peers – and that’s what Brooklyn imports Ashley Blair and Drew Reilly do in Fully Loaded, turning the Underbelly at some ungodly hour into a pulsating queer(ish) celebration-cum-sendup of gen Z anomie. “Everything is empty / Life is a hole / You gotta fill it up,” they sing, looking like refugees from Warhol’s Factory but delivering comedy that couldn’t be more now.
The show starts as if we’re being seconded to a generational revolution, but it’s soon clear that this pair, both Second City alumni, are threats to nothing but your funny bone. Their premise is that life is void of meaning. We flash back to meet them as alienated schoolkids and one terrific sketch, a silly symphony of clinking cutlery and ASMR tuts and sighs, imagines two parents at dinner, struggling to repress their mutual loathing. If this is our hosts’ generational inheritance, why not look for a better way of being? Like a romance with an inverted Centaur Boyfriend, the title of one daft ditty, or like forming a megachurch to start replenishing the spiritual chasm.
There are first-base satirical sideswipes in that latter sketch, against Christian homophobia and the church’s obsession with sin. But Blair and Reilly’s satire is usually garnished with, or eclipsed by, silliness, as they belt out their songs about being bullied in bakeries, and “gooning in the DJ booth”. So much the funnier that these songs are tightly constructed, lyrically adroit and delivered with hardcore hyperpop attack.
Only occasionally does the standard slip: the skit about straight female writers fetishising gay male sex is on point, but soon devolves into so-so smut. That’s not going to fill anyone’s gaping hole – but there’s lots here that will, as Megasquirt minister to our existential angst with whip-smart, high-energy comedy.
