Courteney Hocking’s show plays in the Banner Room at Trade’s Hall, important only because the room is oppressively small.

‘God, I hope she doesn’t bomb cause there’ll be nowhere to hide,’ one member of the audience says before Hocking begins.

She doesn’t bomb, but she doesn’t excel.

It’s a little hard on Hocking to be playing this room, as it’s quite obvious, quite quickly, when a joke doesn’t work. Luckily, Hocking’s material worked often enough, avoiding too many of these moments.

Mainly focusing on Australian culture, with a slightly political edge, she covers topics from immigration to Germaine Greer. An Andrew Bolt piece worked especially well with the festival’s vaguely left audience.

However, Hocking’s comedy was possibly too familiar. At one point, she played a Jonathan Coleman vinyl that covered ‘Aussie songs’ for almost no other reason but to celebrate its naff value.

Hocking played the obvious’Australians are a bit lame, a bit racist’too often. The show was punctuated with too many observations better said after one to many glasses of wine at a dinner party, than to an audience. I wanted Hocking to explore the content from more interesting angles and while, at times, she tried to draw the material together, it never really formed a cohesive whole.

For those happy with relatively entertaining ‘John Howard is a bit crap’ material, Hocking’s show may be worth squeezing into the Banner Room for. For those looking to be taken a bit further, there might be greener pastures.