Jacqueline Mifsud – The Full Mifsud

Jacqueline Mifsud has had an interesting life.  Maltese parents, Mother tried to fit in, but was fiery, irrepressible… Young Jacqueline escapes from Australia, falls in with a travelling dance troupe, has four years in Paris as an English language tour guide (dependent on tips), back to Australia, launches into stand up, wins awards, adds MC-ing, appears on television…  Now, at thirty-eight, to quote her blurb, she’s ‘single, childless and self-employed.’ 

She jumps onto the stage and grabs the mike.  Complains that she’d like a venue where she didn’t need a mike.  Puzzling: this space is very small, an audience of about 30-40 people.  She doesn’t need a mike.

More puzzling, considering she’s been doing this for many years and gets plenty of gigs, is that she talks very fast, almost breathless, as if someone might stop her, but there’s just so much, too much to tell…  In a rush, she talks too fast.  She sabotages herself by swallowing her throw-away asides – that are often her punchlines.

But the most puzzling aspect of Mifsud’s schtick is that she lists her varied, potentially interesting, intriguing experiences as if just that were funny in itself.  She doesn’t milk those experiences for comedy – even if she creates an expectation in the audience that that’s what she will do. 

She makes a couple of jokes about being single and childless – but it sounds defensive - which is probably not at all what she intends.  What went on with the travelling dance troupe?  No – we don’t even learn what she did with them.  Did she dance herself?  (She does do some high kicks.)  Or was she the dogsbody?

When she talks about being a tour guide in Paris, she says she had a written script, but she learned that it was more entertaining – and thus would get her bigger tips – if she went off script, that is, improvised, was irreverent and funny.  But we get not a single example of this.  A crack about the Eiffel Tower?  About Parisians?  No, she moves on from Paris too and the only residue is a smattering of French phrases – even if, as she tells us, the tour guide routines became the basis for her stand-up.

I do not enjoy writing this, but there must be more to Mifsud than wisecracks and energy.  Comedy is hard work.  Unfortunately, Mifsud makes it look like hard work. 

After forty minutes on my night, she wraps it up – whether that’s standard, or she knows she’s not getting a lot of laughs, or she’s given up on us, it’s hard to say.  I wanted to say something reassuring on the way out, but I doubt it would have been appreciated.

Michael Brindley