Review: Duncan Trussell at Astor Theatre

Duncan Trussell at Astor Theatre
Monday, August 25, 2025

One of the most attractive features of a Duncan Trussell experience is his natural ability to seamlessly blend the comedic with the cosmic. The celebrated podcaster, actor, and comedian brought his self-styled brand of comical, psychedelic philosophy to Perth on Monday night, performing at the Astor Theatre for the final date of his highly anticipated Australian tour.

An eager audience of Trussell devotees had packed in on a rainy Monday evening for a cocktail of lyrical musings, spiritual enquiry, and candid reflection, but most importantly, for the laughs. Australian comic and podcaster in his own right, Nick Capper, warmed up the audience before introducing Trussell to the stage to a mass cheer.

From the moment Duncan Trussell walked out, his energy was infectious and beaming across the theatre. Opening with rapid-fire riffs on the contrast of being in Australia to living in the United States, likening it to the collapse of modern civilisation, foretelling what a pending apocalyptic world would do to a comic who is not blessed with any resourceful skill set.

What sets Trussell apart is his ability to veer effortlessly from silliness to sincerity. One moment he’s quipping about his fascination for doom scrolling the history of deaths at Disneyland, remarking on raising a young family and what it’s like to live with a family of Swifties, and then the next he’s offering up honest and hilarious anecdotes about what it’s like to experience the EDC festival in Las Vegas with a group of middle-aged friends for a midlife crisis party, armed with a legal ketamine prescription.

Although Trussell loves to remark on the absurdities of the modern world, he also tends to relish in the self-described cyclone of chaos that he resides in. His ability to embrace the crazy in a world that he’s obviously comfortable in, as he began red-pilling the audience as his set moved into the more classic Duncan topics: preaching that humans are currently sharing the planet with a non-human super intelligence (A.I.) and admitting that he’s in a toxic relationship with ChatGPT as it refuses to tell him how much semen it would take to fill up the Grand Canyon.

One of Trussell’s strengths has always been his relatability and absence of ego. He might be a self-confessed, enlightened doomsayer, but he’s also a storyteller with contagious energy and charm. He professes that people aren’t prepared for just how strange things have yet to get but delivers such notions with fast-paced wit and whimsy through overtones of hilarious enlightenment, which is what really drove the pace of the evening’s performance. Rather than wallowing in cynicism, his performance draws the audience into his own, unique and hilarious worldview.

Although his real talents shine in long-form conversation—such as the deep philosophical musings of The Midnight Gospel or his podcast The Duncan Trussell Family Hour—Trussell’s stand-up show foregrounds what his legion of fans seem truly drawn to: an overly curious mind. It’s the means by which Trussell devours the mysteries of the universe while decoding the human experience, all while poking fun at modern culture, late-stage capitalism, and the existential dread of living in 2025.

ZAC NICHOLS