Tom Ballard’s Enough, directed by Bob Franklin and staged at the Melbourne Town Hall as part of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, is at its heart an opportunity to explore. And when I say explore I really mean scream into the void at the smorgasbord of imminent personal, national and global crises facing millennials today.

Now, if there’s one thing I loathe watching, it’s an angry rant. Certainly, one that lasts more than ten minutes. And that’s precisely what Enough is: an hour long millennial-style rant that makes points you’d expect to find in the corners of a twenty-something’s Tumblr or Twitter. But you know what? I’m going to have to eat my words because Enough was a rant that I absolutely bloody loved.

I’m not sure losing a TV show on the national public broadcaster is an experience many of us can relate to. But I am sure most of us have known the pain of unemployment, and equally, the joy that comes with being able to bag out an ex-employer after leaving (or being forced to leave) your job. I won’t lie, there is something immensely satisfying about watching Ballard relish the opportunity to freely tear his once-employer, his critics, and even his own now-cancelled series to shreds.

From here Ballard transitions smoothly into an interrogation of our sad submission to capitalism via a fart metaphor, because, of course. The highlight of this act- no, the highlight of the entire show, was undoubtedly his rendition of Dolly Parton’s anti-capitalist anthem ‘9 to 5’ in the style of My Chemical Romance. A fellow audience member stared at me with some concern as tears streamed down my face I was laughing so hard.

Tom Ballard is somehow able to get away with doing almost everything you shouldn’t do to an audience. Where most of us see comedy to escape the cold, harsh reality of the world, Ballard refuses to provide the audience with any of that catharsis. Instead he punches us right in the gut with climate change, the injustices of capitalism and the housing market, and the state of Australian politics. Oohf. He predominantly goes after Baby Boomers, taking the odd swing at Gen X-ers. The millennials in the audience (myself included) cackle gleefully at Ballard’s takedown of the rich and the over 30. And then he goes in for the kill: revealing himself to be a millennial traitor. He’s a wealthy home owner. It’s the ultimate betrayal to the only section of the audience still rooting for him, and it’s pretty solid metaphor for the experience of most twenty-somethings in 2019. The world only pretending to befriend you before it pulls the rug from underneath your feet and takes your first-born and a kidney in the name of HECS-debt.

Ultimately, the extreme hilarity of this work really comes from the sense of overwhelming despair underpinning his words. The most terrifying realisation comes from the fact that it probably doesn’t matter that Ballard outs himself as a traitor to his generation. The world’s going to shit for all of us and soon we’ll all be in the same boat, or ‘UberSwim’, when the ice caps finally melt.

Enough is one of the most brutal, most successful works I’ve had the pleasure (or displeasure?) of seeing in a long while. It’s perhaps unfortunate that Ballard’s Tonightly was cancelled, but in the sense that it gave rise to this absolute gold mine of a show we might still see a rather brilliant silver lining.

Ellie Woods

Enough by Tom Ballard runs at The Melbourne Town Hall in the Melbourne International Comedy Festival from 28 March — 21 April 2019.