Having reviewed lots of Barnie Duncan’s shows before, the most recent being Just Jokes two years ago, I jumped at the chance to review Oooky Pooky. This is its first outing and it will take a few more performances for Barnie to determine what works and what doesn’t – although the apparent randomness and his self-questioning is just as engaging as the slow realisation there is method in this post-clowning comedy show.  

Two threads hold it together: the meaning of the title and a cassette tape that recorded an astrologer’s predictions of Barnie’s future for his mother. But much madness, for want of a better word, precedes and surrounds these revelations, and the extra dimensions they bring to the show.

What seems like a nonsense audience warm-up exercise is referred back to later in a way that suggests we might review the whole hour as a social experiment. Meanwhile we are warned things are going to get spicy and we’re invited to join a midwife-like quest to deliver humour.

We see teabags and a sock used very creatively – and this too gets a later reprise that is amusingly dramatic. It’s an old shoe box of stuff kept by his Mum that brings the cassette to the fore, and snippets are played intermittently to allow us all to compare and contrast the predictions with actuality (kudos to Emma Maguire for impeccably-timed tech support).

A convoluted ghost/goat/GOAT joke needs work but the Stingray impression is priceless, not least when linked to Katy Perry in space. And there are running references to a show Barnie did some years ago that, seen through today’s more woke lens, might have been inappropriate – and this creates dramatic tension: will he try to do it again?

Here’s where the meanings of words come in. I thought Oooky Pooky might be a variation on Oogie Boogie but it’s from his mother’s generation and apparently means creepy in a “male-adjacent grubbiness” way (cf. Russell Brand). Barnie also touches on the meaning of ‘bap’ at private and public levels and confesses to a confused understanding, as a child, of ‘Sunday’ and ‘Indian’ which leads to observations concerning his father’s guru.

While the weird and random components seem to escalate with an impression of a shy moth at work Christmas function, and an enquiry into what moths and butterflies think of each other, the seemingly disparate components of what has gone before finally come together, so to speak, in a spectacular way that I will not divulge here.

We are left to ponder whether it’s all been froth or an experimental deeper dive into oooky pookiness.

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