Review: Peter Helliar at Hamilton Hill Memorial Hall
Peter Helliar’s An International Kerfuffle at Hamilton Hill Memorial Hall
Saturday, October 31, 2026
If we’d asked the tarot cards where Aussie comedian-slash-all-round legend (as a solitary person in the crowd called out to him, much to his dismay that it wasn’t a unified shout) Peter Helliar would spend the spookiest night of the year, Side Splitter Comedy Festival probably wouldn’t have come out upright. Not among the white sheet ghosts drifting through Cockburn—though of course Helliar got a couple of cracks in at the municipal district’s expense; they’re practically a contractual obligation at this point. He mentioned that a friend of his shares the unfortunate surname, so those jokes had been sitting in his back pocket for years, ageing like a fine wine no one asked to uncork. And as for the best trick-or-treat costumes being spotted in Fremantle—let’s just say some of those looks aren’t seasonal, and they’re not costumes either.
The evening’s real lesson, though, was in the art of landing wit without detonating it—which was rich, considering An International Kerfuffle was based on a very true story (his words, more or less; he did cheerfully admit to embellishing liberally throughout). The show centred on the time he served up a spicy joke about ISIS and Tim Cahill on The Project, the kind of punchline that probably aged about as well in the greenroom as it did on national television. Suffice to say, audience protection was strongly advised when the banter got that geopolitically loaded.
Outside, a gorgeous garden bar hummed with tables and food tents, because you’ve always got to give Aussies their tucker before filling them up with laughs—comedy as dessert, not entrée. And in true Australian fashion, the back of the main hall room filled up long before anyone dared the front row, which remained stubbornly empty until the very last minute—as though sitting within roasting distance of a comedian were some sort of extreme sport no one had trained for.
That front-row caution proved well-founded when Helliar exploded onto the stage in true party-boy style—more on that shortly—as DJ Snake and Lil Jon’s Turn Down for What rattled the speakers. The crowd skewed late-thirties-and-beyond, with a millennial sprinkle who clocked the tune immediately and knew they were in safe, if chaotic, hands. Helliar wasted no time confirming it: laughter, he declared, was the best medicine—somewhere between chemotherapy and butter menthols. A line so dark it needed its own trigger warning and a torch.
Some might have assumed his jokes would be purely verbal. Not so. He came armed with visual aids, flicking through a slideshow like a university student who’d put a little too much love into their PowerPoint and not nearly enough into their thesis—bragging-rights photos with sports stars, clips from The Project and Rove, and, naturally, a childhood birthday party snap. Which was precisely where party-boy Helliar entered the picture; if you hadn’t already clocked it, he let P!nk’s Get the Party Started do the explaining. Subtlety, it seemed, was not on the setlist.
With such a wide age range in the room, Helliar’s humour cast a broad net—contextually sharp one moment, dropping phrases like “hot girl summer” the next as though he’d just discovered TikTok and wanted everyone to know. There were points, though, where the slapstick started to loop back on itself, jokes that had landed a few minutes earlier returning with noticeably less spring—like a boomerang you were hoping might just keep going. But overall, Helliar didn’t leave us in an awful fright. If anything, he was more like a good Mars Bar—reliable, familiar, and guaranteed to hit the craving, but the kind of thing you’d reach for on a relaxed night in rather than when you were after something with a bit more bite.
RACHEL FINUCANE