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Jon Bennett Credit: Courtesy<\/p>\nJon Bennett Credit: Courtesy<\/p>\n
Jon Bennett hails from a pig farm in the outback of Australia, the youngest of four in a religious family<\/a>. As a vegetarian, pig farming disagreed with his tenets. So Bennett sought the stage instead, traveling and performing around the world for 17 years.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Aussie background does not deter his appeal to American audiences (see Dundee, Crocodile, after all). For one night, Bennett is bringing two of his hit shows to the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ameri-CAN, formerly known as Ameri-CAN\u2019T, tells the tale of his nine-hour detainment when moving to the U.S. near the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. His move to the U.S. followed a two-year return to the family pig farm during the pandemic.\u00a0<\/p>\n Bennett admits to Orlando Weekly that turning traumatic experiences into material for his shows operates as an ineffective coping mechanism.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cEven when I was being detained for nine hours, there was something in my brain that was like, \u2018This could be something,\u2019 and that I needed to talk about them,\u201d he says. \u201cNow that I get regular therapy, my therapist is like, \u2018Yeah, you\u2019ve worked out these traumas with your shows, but that\u2019s not exactly the healthiest way to do it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Noted: Do not pursue a career in comedy in place of therapy.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ameri-CAN, under its former title, has already earned recognition locally,\u00a0 winning the Patron\u2019s Pick Award Winner when Bennett brought the show to Orlando Fringe in 2024.\u00a0<\/p>\n Bennett\u2019s rebranding of his show with a new title keeps the storytelling all the same, just with a lighter tone in contrast to current politics. He\u2019s found Americans to be amazed by his Australian background and enthusiastic to show him around when he was a visiting performer.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe thing that made me want to move to America is that the people were really lovely, really friendly and welcoming to me \u2014 a white immigrant. No matter the politics, I don\u2019t think Americans know just how friendly they are to outsiders,\u201d Bennett says.\u00a0<\/p>\n Fire in the Meth Lab is another show Bennett is bringing back to Orlando, and it\u2019s a complex, humorous reflection of his relationship with his brother and his brother\u2019s drug addiction.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMy belief is that it\u2019s the only sort of disease that we criminalize. No one says \u2018stop having cancer,\u2019 but you see a drug addict and you immediately judge them and paint them in a bad light. Whereas I think that\u2019s unfair for them, especially having someone who I love go through this and watching that happen,\u201d Bennett says.<\/p>\n In the show, he recounts his brother\u2019s story and how his sibling spent the majority of his adult life in jail. Bennett questions the progression of his brother\u2019s life, evaluating his upbringing and ultimately deciding it is due to something bigger than him. \u201cI think it\u2019s a systemic problem, not a personal one, even though he\u2019s a bit of an asshole,\u201d says Bennett.\u00a0<\/p>\n Bennett started in stand-up when he was 19, moving up to be a feature performer in the years after. His routine shifted when a headliner approached him after a show and told Bennett\u00a0 that he had just done his joke before this headliner was about to go on.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s when I started doing more storytelling with real stuff that\u2019s happened to me because if someone else says, \u2018I fell into a dead cow when I was a kid,\u2019 then I\u2019ll be like \u2018Oh, that\u2019s amazing. Me too.\u2019 You know, it\u2019s got that sort of thing. It was my attempt to be as original as I possibly could,\u201d Bennett says.\u00a0<\/p>\n His latest script, This Will Only Ever Happen Once, intertwines his lifelong love for wildlife and his knack for hysterically absurd trauma-dumping onstage. The show was featured<\/a> in the just-wrapped Fringe Winter Mini-Fest.\u00a0<\/p>\n Bennett\u2019s therapist has suggested he hasn\u2019t actually worked through any of his traumas, despite talking it out to his audiences while touring.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cNow we\u2019re working through these actual traumas that I have that I feel like I\u2019ve put out there, but I haven\u2019t really dealt with them,\u201d Bennett says. \u201cI deal with them by doing shows about them, which people relate to because people relate to humanistic vulnerability type stuff, but really, I haven\u2019t actually dealt with them myself.\u201d<\/p>\n And you can see him try to deal with it all\u00a0 this Thursday.<\/p>\n 6:30 & 8:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 22, Alexis and Jim Pugh Theater, Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, 445 S. Magnolia Ave., drphillipscenter.org<\/a>, $29.50-$35.40.<\/p>\n Orlando\u2019s daily dose of what matters. Subscribe to The Daily Weekly.<\/p>\n Related Stories<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t \n\t\t\t\t\tThe \u2018high-octane outdoor roller coaster\u2019 joins the park in 2027\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t \n\t\t\t\t\tWilliams convenes an \u2018electro-acoustic summit\u2019 at Timucua with percussionist Thad Anderson\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
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