Review: Tor Snyder at Regal Chorus Room
Tor Snyder at Regal Chorus Room
Friday, May 8, 2026
Before a single formal joke landed, Tor Snyder was already onstage eating a banana to David Rose’s The Stripper—a commitment to the bit that felt both knowingly stupid and ominously purposeful. Naturally, the banana would return later with Chekhovian inevitability.
The Canadian-born, Melbourne-based comic’s Tor De Force thrived on conversational looseness and crowd engagement, trading the precision-engineered rhythm of social-media stand-up clips for something shaggier and more intimate. While the set carried an easy stoner-chic casualness, Snyder’s callbacks and improvisation revealed a well-constructed hour beneath the relaxed surface.
A recurring thread throughout the night was displacement—what’s lost and gained through migration, creative survival, and adulthood generally. Snyder reminisced about Canada with affectionate absurdity: proper maple syrup; legal weed “that’s not the same thing”; an infamous crack-smoking mayor; and Justin Trudeau reframed less as a politician than “a Prime Minister you’d want to fuck”.
Having relocated to Melbourne via Perth, Snyder also punctured the fantasy that moving cities automatically kick-starts a creative career. References to comedy gigs, furniture design, studying radio and hairdressing simultaneously and Facebook Marketplace hustles painted a portrait recognisable to anyone cobbling together a living through creative side quests and precarious arts work.
What elevated the set beyond millennial oversharing, though, was Snyder’s ability to make domestic minutiae feel rich rather than mundane. Anecdotes about her partner, cat, and home life carried a warmth that offset the more chaotic material. Her deadpan acknowledgement that audiences seemed shocked this apparent lesbian had a male partner landed well, gently skewering assumptions around appearance and identity without overplaying the joke.
Even well-worn comedy terrain—dating apps, polyamory, farting in front of partners—found fresh angles through Snyder’s specificity. A riff connecting flatulence etiquette to the actual definition of gaslighting spiralled beautifully into a joke about opening a window on a plane mid-flight.
The evening’s strongest sections emerged through audience interaction. Snyder excelled at pulling threads from crowd responses and letting them mutate unpredictably, whether interrogating what everyone was watching on television or warning non-parents they’d soon be Googling “One Blip, One Cup” after discussing the horrors of monitoring children’s YouTube habits. The material eventually veered into absurd Law & Order: SVU fan-fiction—part procedural parody, part erotic nonsense—with Snyder happily allowing awkward pauses and stilted audience responses to become part of the joke itself.
The banana, meanwhile, evolved from dumb visual gag into a recurring prop used to skewer bro culture, content creators, and masculine performance. By the time Snyder closed the night, we felt like a night with old mates had only just begun: silly, self-aware and slightly messy.