Stephen K. Amos has been a constant stand-up performer at the Adelaide Fringe for over twenty years. With a charming, good-natured demeanour, his jokes fall into the ‘harmless fun’ category for laughs, while Amos’ audience interactions are some of the best I’ve seen from any stand-up comedian. It’s one of the reasons I’ve been watching him since the late 90’s (showing my age) and also the reason I chose to watch him perform for the third year in a row at The Garden of Unearthly Delights. 

With his show Oxymoron, Stephen blends a little bit of new material with a fair bit of the old. Great for audience members who’d never seen his show before but, for this reviewer, it was the same stuff that I’d heard in 2022 and 2023. And, although I expected to hear some of the more popular jokes repeated, I was betting on the hilarious audience interactions to get me through a side-splitting hour of stand-up. With a baby in the audience, an 11-year-old in the front row, and Blake the sparky the target for Amos’ humorous rants, the laughs came thick and fast in the first half hour. But, unlike his previous shows, Amos pulled back from the audience in the second half of the show, weaving new material in with the old, with mixed results, but still getting some almighty roars of laughter at his own expense when a joke fell flat.

Overall, Oxymoron is a work in progress. It seems as if Amos is feeling his way through new material and seeing what hits with the crowd and what misses. Although I do think the COVID jokes are past their use-by date, Amos’ fun attitude toward life and comedy, in general, carried him through this show with ease.

FOUR STARS ****