Comedy / Before and After, Caitlin Maggs and Sarah Stewart. At The Street Theatre, March 16. Reviewed by HELEN MUSA.

You know the Canberra Comedy Festival is in full flight when you get to the Street Theatre just before 4pm and find people pushing and shoving to get in, as it was when I went to the theatre to see comedians Caitlin Maggs and Sarah Stewart in their festival gig, Before and After.

It’s always intrigued me as to how comedians actually get people to laugh, but this show gave me a few handy clues.

To begin with, you need a willing audience, people who have come to be entertained. There were a few grey heads in the audience but it was mostly a younger crowd of mixed gender, ready for anything.

Maggs and Stewart, both mums – one young and one proudly older – have a considerable amount of hardware in their armoury, so have teamed up to riff on parenthood, marriage, gender and the workplace in a show somewhat short of an hour. The time sped by, leaving me wondering why this level of entertainment is so rare in “straight” theatre.

Maggs was up first. With a career as an electrician in a male-dominated trade, a compliant husband in the audience and a six-year-old child taking over the household, she has plenty of material and an easy affability with the audience, a good thing, since much of her set was taken up with quips about subject of ADHD an Asperger’s Syndrome, no laughing matter, you may say. But it proved very funny, especially the story where she tries to explain the concept of sarcasm to an Asperger’s child.

Maggs has another weapon to hand as she makes jokes about her own body size, but it’s when she turns to her workplace that she really shines, pouring scorn on her patronising male colleagues.

Suddenly she stopped, leaving the audience wanting more.

Stewart, proudly 62, has a different background from Maggs and therefore different weapons.

A former midwife, she  is comfortable with the human body and not shy and cracking jokes about dildos, male appendages, and in one  hilarious tale, the scientific knowledge required for a woman to pee in the bush.

Her gambits often verge on the rude and risqué. Like Maggs, she is familiar and casual with the audience, indicating  with a wink and a nod  that the women in the audience know just what she’s talking about.

Stewart has longer tales to tell than Maggs, one concerning a disastrous camping trip with her husband, who is the butt of many jokes, and another about a “silent disco walk” enhanced by magic mushroom chocolates. True or false, it got the laughs and also allowed Stewart to boast that she’d achieved what all parents dreamed of – being considered “hip” by her child.