Lano & Woodley: The Island

Having seen Lano and Woodley on Australian television and been impressed with their wit and humour I expected this DVD would be some of their best material but I found their TV performances to be at least as funny. A lot of this performance is funny and one bit at the end had me rolling in laughter but some of it is just plain silly and I was put off by their reliance on ad-libs, or faux ad-libs. They broke character and scene a lot to make light of their own stage play. The plot of the show has Lano and Woodley getting marooned on a desert island after a plane crash. It seems like they took this basic plot and collected every ad-lib along the way to form about two thirds of the show. I'm not saying that ad-libbing and straying from the plot isn't standard fare for comedians, but when the whole show is like this, when the "mistakes" are so deliberate, it becomes patronising. They went too far out of the context of the desert island for me with their interaction with the audience. I suppose the audience on the night may have enjoyed it, it was after all for them. If I was in the crowd I probably would have felt I had my money's worth. Alas, for me their legend has faded. They were more ad-libbers than comic talents.