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Reviews - Live Shows

Jesus Loves Me, He Just Hates What I’m Doing

Opinionated Bint

G-Strings and Jockstraps

A Bit of a Postscript


Jesus Loves Me, He Just Hates What I’m Doing
The Age, 13 April 2005
Surpasses the Post
By Helen Razer

The unruly heretic is back in a spanking new pair of hard-wearing jeans just as crisply pressed as her set of all-new naughtiness.

As Sue-Ann Post herself freely allows, this is a woman with a life that could only lead to comedy. If you’re a queer, migrant, Mormon who shot to the height of a Viking in your teens, you either tell pithy jokes or you spend a mortified life in the company of counselors. Fortunately for us, Post chose the former therapeutic option.

Post recounts a recent engagement in Salt Lake City where she offered her laudable services as a speaker. Addressing an assembly of bizarrely repressed gay Christians at this spiritual ground zero was a gift that Post accepted with comedic enthusiasm. She doesn’t waste one millisecond of oddity.

When she’s not riffing on religion, Post turns her zealous attention to other monumental systems of deceit. Gender, sexuality and the mating habits of rodents all get a look in.

At an increased ease with her lot, Post now adds vulnerability to her comedic arsenal. She’s always been funny, clever and resolutely strange. These days, she’s warm to boot.


Opinionated Bint
Herald Sun, 16 April 2002

The Most Shocking News Arrives by Post
By Chris Boyd

The first time I saw orphan-Mormon-lesbian- comedian Sue-Ann Post she was setting attendance records at La Mama at the 1991 Comedy Festival. She was getting 80-plus audiences for a one woman in an armchair with wine cask work-in-progress.

There were just two men in an audience: that year’s festival patron Terry Jones, ensconced in the middle at the back, and yours truly in the only vacant seat, front and centre.

Fearsome looking she may be, but the then gap-toothed giant is a most gentle spirit.
And I felt so comfortable I heckled – politely, of course.

Post now plays to packed houses of adoring men and women, gay, straight and everything in between. And she gets away with murder. She says the most shocking and appalling things with the impunity of someone whose life has been so damnable that she’d use the fires of hell to toast her marshmallows.

In her sights this year are virgins and the monogamous. Sex, she tells us, can be as casual as a game of tennis. And her score is love all.



G-Strings and Jockstraps
The Age, 16 April 1999
By Fiona Scott-Norman

Some of the best comedy Posty has ever done. G-Strings and Jockstraps is a cracker of a show, about growing up with five brothers and a love of sport, Dutch heritage, topless sumo wrestling with the Jim Rose freak show circus (complete with slides), body image, and finishing up with Post’s budding career as an Olympian. When hitting the mark, Post is a truly great comedian, generous of spirit and ever so slightly twisted. Like an open fire, she generates warmth, and makes you feel good just beholding her. Post can talk about concepts and issues that would just be “ick” coming from anyone else, and engages your emotions as well as your mind. G-Strings and Jockstraps is beautifully structured, ending with a marvelous routine about hammer throwing. One of those rare shows you really don’t want to end. Lovely, lovely work.



A Bit of a Postscript
Canberra Times, 7 May 1991

Comedy and a Cup of Tea Reaches Common Ground
By Helen Musa

What will the counselor advise when you explain you’ve just failed to commit suicide with a butter knife, lost your father in the Granville train disaster, abandoned your Mormon faith and discovered you are a lesbian? Why, to have a nice cup of tea – what else?

It is the stranger-than-fiction reality of such stories that has become comedian Sue-Ann Post’s stock in trade, leading her at one time to consider subtitling this show, Personal Trauma for Profit and Gain. The fickle finger which pointed Sue-Ann Post in the direction of everything at just the wrong time led her father to join the non-smoking carriage for the first time ever as he left Blackheath station one morning. It is by no means the most extraordinary story she tells.

The seemingly enormous Post is by moments radiantly graceful as she flashes her eyes in recognition of some absurdity, or formidably ugly as she bares her damaged teeth in contempt at some other. Director Ingleton has helped Post vary her tone so that amid the amusement there are scraps of poetry and touches of genuine sadness and regret, which bind her to the audience she engages so easily.

In a scant hour, A Bit of a Postscript dwells much on the Mormon faith in which Post grew up. The 27-year-old comedian seeks the common ground between her adult self and the 14-year-old “merry maid” of yore, whose existence she can scarcely credit. She finds it.

Through her vulnerability and awareness she also finds common ground with an audience not necessarily of her sisterhood. It is this very funny show’s greatest achievement.

A Bit of a Postscript
In Press, 3 April 1991
By Fiona Scott-Norman

Over the last couple of years La Mama has established itself as a major small Comedy Festival venue; it may only seat a few, but the quality of the acts presented is usually of an extremely high standard. Sue-Ann Post’s show, A Bit of a Postscript, is a wonderful solo show, and anyone searching for something with a bit of subtlety and depth to complement the comedy should go no further.

Sue-Ann sits in a chair, drinks most of a bottle of red wine, and intersperses short incisive poems with warm monologues about her Mormon upbringing, “We believed God lives on a planet just past Pluto”, coming out as a lesbian, alcoholism, incest, and suicide. She is brilliant, managing to negotiate the darkest and most taboo subjects; this is a lesbian stand-up comic who performs successfully every week to bucks nights at the Comedy Store in Sydney, which gives an indication of her skill and accessibility.

The show was directed by Sue Ingleton, a talented comic performer herself, and that understanding of comedy shines through in Post’s performance; exactly the right amount of pathos and/or humour is wrung from each anecdote.

Sue-Ann laughs at, and with, herself; she makes her point without being cruel and bitter, without alienating her audience, and without compromising herself. She had the audience cheering for her successes, and laughing at her failures; Sue-Ann Post is a great raconteur. This is the sort of performance which is seen all too rarely; one which enlightens, obliterates prejudice, and energises as well as entertains. Men, I should stress, would be more than comfortable at Post’s shows; there is no separatism or aggression in her act. My 68 year-old mother thought she was fabulous.