It’s been a tough sell for the audience so far but Daniel Muggleton will not stop talking about cordial. The Sydney-based comedian’s show You May Be White, I May Be Crazy tackles fatherhood, becoming a parent, accepting your limitations and the divorce of fact and opinion in 2025, thanks to the accessibility of the internet. It’s a broad show, but Muggleton delicately balances each topic to make it work.
A tough audience may not have appreciated the cordial jokes, but Muggleton’s excellent crowd work means he saves the show from every lull the audience throws at him. This creates an hour that strangely feels entirely written for that audience on that night. Muggleton begins his set talking about Christies Beach, traffic in Adelaide compared to Sydney, and weeknight audiences to warm the crowd up. It’s the basics of comedy, but he does it so effectively that it makes the show feel genuinely unique.
He doesn’t just deliver material-wise, but also through set-based comedy. Delivered to an open-air audience in a shipping container, Muggleton uses the venue to his advantage. He jokes about still being at the point in his career where he has to arrange chairs himself and uses the container’s walls as an in-show rule whenever a joke doesn’t work. This adds to the material, as Muggleton takes a series of seemingly isolated topics at first and turns them into a coherent idea about how to parent in 2025.
Daniel Muggleton: You May Be White, I May Be Crazy, Gluttony, until 23 March