Yuki Nivez Is Funny & Ferocious In ‘Active Bitch Face’

When Tokyo’s queen of deadpan made her Sydney Fringe Festival debut, she didn’t come to take prisoners. Yuki Nivez brought the laughs with her show Active Bitch Face, weaving comedy and commentary together in a genuinely entertaining way.

From the moment that the show started in Newtown’s intimate Laugh Inn, Yuki’s ability to make the audience laugh was immediately obvious. With no more than a hundred people packed into the Newtown Hotel’s Laugh Inn, she came out swinging with jokes about experiences with crossing the language barrier and extremely underwhelming men.

Unlike some bigger-ticket comedy shows, Active Bitch Face is not an ultra-polished hour; if anything, it would feel weird to perform one in such a small venue. Instead, it’s more a collection of great jokes that Yuki has cultivated over the years, mixed in with crowdwork – some of which was planned, but plenty wasn’t.

For instance, one of Yuki’s earliest jokes in the hour was about how making the mistake between ‘erection’ and ‘election’ can have some… disastrous effect. However, during the joke’s setup, an audience member accidentally ruined the punchline, but Yuki effortlessly turned this into its own really funny bit.

The connection between Yuki and the audience varied substantially, depending on who she called on. There were definitely some audience members that didn’t seem willing to play the crowdwork game, but the ones that were keen to do so more than made up for it by playing into her propensity for being entertaingly mean to audience members.

Yuki Nivez brings comedy with commentary to Sydney Fringe

I felt that Yuki struck a great balance between written jokes and crowd work throughout the hour. Nowadays, it often feels like many comedians you see online only do crowdwork, and it’s refreshing to have a comedian willing to balance these two modes of humour effectively… even if some planned crowd interactions didn’t go as planned (like asking if there were “any straight women in the audience” in Newtown).

But what also made Yuki’s show so fun was the undercurrent of commentary throughout each of the jokes, particularly about sexist attitudes. The most compelling stretch of the show for me was recalling her time on a working holiday in Australia, and how her scary, ‘samurai’ father would still refuse to talk with her directly.

While she made the story extremely entertaining, it also speaks to her willingness to speak out against the patriarchal systems of Japan and the world that affect her as an Asian woman in comedy. Though this show was perhaps not quite as focused on this topic as I might’ve expected, Yuki’s jokes still had plenty of bite in addressing the topic.

It makes Yuki Nivez: Active Bitch Face a highly entertaining comedy show that mixes both crowdwork and more traditional jokes to great effect. With a deadpan attitude that’s both funny and ferocious, Yuki’s entertaining hour is well-worth catching at this year’s Sydney Fringe Festival.

Yuki Nivez: Active Bitch Face is playing at Sydney Fringe until September 7.