Comedians are generally a pretty awkward bunch, and MICF debutantes (though you wouldn’t guess it) Ted Wilson and Aleisha McCormack have clearly decided to not buck the trend with their show, Dead To Me.

Oh, it’s awkward, from Wilson’s solo start to the show, doing his best Flight of the Conchords ‘I’m a crazy Kiwi nerd’ thing (actually, both Wilson and McCormack are Tasmanians, but I don’t blame him for pretending), to the banter between the two probably-should-be-lovers – Wilson and McCormack are now housemates, after McCormack was left at the altar by Wilson’s best mate Rick (the jokes practically write themselves). Dead To Me is straight-up twentysomething angst and hilarity. It’s like Friends, but made by – and for! – smart people.

With McCormack mostly playing it straight – well, as straight as the festival gets – and a bit bemused against Wilson’s mix of acerbic wit and naiveté, the show really depends on its back and forth, and is all the better for it.

It’s hard to say which of these performers, if either, holds the comedic key, but it is certain that Wilson is on the good end of most of Dead To Me‘s good jokes. Indeed, McCormack’s brief solo forays fall a little flat without Wilson’s ripostes. Her childhood, for instance, seems ripe for the picking and will probably make a good future show in its own right, but plonked in the middle of the banter it’s just out of place.

Content-wise, Dead To Me hardly veers from well-trodden ground: the pair talk about their relationships (mostly failed, mostly hilarious), and though it’s hardly avant-garde comedy, the point is that it works. Unless you count Wilson’s couple of dress-ups, respectively as McCormack’s mum (a startlingly odd and wonderful Cher imitation), and an affable magistrate (we were, after all, seated in the intimidating confines of the Old Magistrates’ Court at the Old Melbourne Gaol), what Wilson and McCormack present is stock-standard back-and-forth comedy. But the banter works. And ultimately that’s all that counts.