Matt Elsbury doesn’t like advertising. Neither do I. Neither do you, probably. This gives the Melbourne comic a ready audience for his multimedia attack on the words and imagery which intrude on us each day.

Playing in the cinema room at Glitch, Elsbury utilises the technology at his disposal and peppers his show with video excerpts and skits. The best and most creative of these videos introduces the show. In it, we see an animated Elsbury battling against one of the advertising world’s most recognisable icons: a great visual way to set up the ‘versus’ of the title.

Elsbury’s targets are mostly television commercials, partly because of their immediacy and partly because of the venue and its possibilities. He acknowledges the beauty of some imagery in ads (the Jose Gonzalez-soundtracked, bouncing-colourful-balls ad for an LCD TV, for instance), but questions whether we really feel like buying much after seeing them. The central premise of Elsbury’s show is the notion that ‘our world’ and ‘advertising world’ are places that bear no resemblance to one another.

Bashing advertising is a fairly easy sport. Making this clever, interesting and insightful takes some skill. Leaping Larry L has been doing this for some years in his ‘Ad Nauseum’ column in The Age’s Green Guide, and Elsbury manages to find some new angles. Yet, because you sense that no one’s really going to disagree with his premise, Elsbury’s show is gently amusing and enjoyable rather than taboo-breaking and hilarious.