Black humour is a special genre that only a few can pull off. Dark thoughts about subject matter such as abortion sometimes enter (some of) our minds, but never spoken aloud - well not in social situations.

Mandy Knight has turned this into an art form. She uses shock value to wake up her audience and the nervous laughter at the start of her show indicates that the half full crowd is uncertain where their steward is going to take them.

Queen Biatch is a take on Knight’s last year’s very successful show, “Inappropriate".

She starts like she did at the 2020 Fringe, bantering with the audience. When I say banter I mean sledging. It’s a well used comedic trick to ease the audience into what is about to unfold. All I can say is don’t sit close to the front.

Her opening is quite incisive observational humour about the difference between millennials and boomers. There’s a couple of pure gold one-liners which like her inappropriate show are shocking, dark, and yes, totally inappropriate - but isn’t that the point of being a Queen Biatch?

There is some wickedly cutting commentary about Mandurah but then Knight slips back to her old routine.

A set on her ex-husband and her mother-in-law follows and unfortunately misses the mark. Mother-in-law humour seems a bit jaded in this day an age and her delivery was a little flat, almost as if she realised from the audience reaction that her routine sounded tired.

Her hyped up, almost manic delivery that she is famous for seemed to leave her. Knight is a world class comic and it seemed that she wasn’t present for this show.
I felt the entire audience wanted for her to go back to her observational humour about how a POM sees Perthites. 

It’s a pity because she’s too funny, smart and incisive to rely on old material.