Review: Lou Wall’s Breaking the Fifth Wall, Standup Comedy for the Post-Truth Era

It’s a challenge to review Breaking the Fifth Wall at Soho Playhouse because I’m not entirely sure what it was. It could be a lighthearted evening of “very online” comedy that can be taken at face value. It could be a searing meta commentary on the nature of truth in standup, politics, and on the Internet. Or it could be one giant trick that Australian standup Lou Wall is artfully playing on the audience, with the joke only becoming obvious once we leave the theater and check our phones to see what was real and what wasn’t. But can you even trust what comes up in a search? As Wall points out, anyone can change Google; or at least, they can make it look like they’ve changed Google using AI.

Wall (who uses “they/them” pronouns) kicks off the night by telling the audience about their favorite bit of standup, the one that made them go viral and brought them to the US. They do the bit (a quite funny account of trying to give away a bedframe on Facebook Marketplace) then slowly reveal more and more about the story, bringing the audience into how they develop their work.

At the same time, they use anecdotal jokes as “bricks” to build a wall for the audience. This is the fifth wall: the unstated agreement that standups pretend like everything they talk about really happened to them, while the audience lets them pretend. Wall points it out early in the show: “You know when a comedian starts ‘Something happened on my way over here tonight,’ it’s actually something that happened six months ago, right?” And the revelations spiral out from there. It’s very much the experience of going down a rabbit hole online about your favorite conspiracy theory: being bombarded with sights and sounds you don’t always have time to process, with someone telling you secrets that might just be lies. Everything feels real—but images, videos, and other “proof” can’t be trusted.

Wall is an excellent comedian, telling quips with a spontaneity that feels genuine. Because of the nature of this show, I now am fully conscious of the fact that these beats are scripted far in advance; but that only makes Wall more impressive. Wall delights in the American audience, which makes us delight in them even more. “You are the only audience in the world that said ‘Yes’ when I asked if you trusted me,” they giggle. From their giddy reaction, it seems that Americans are significantly more gullible than other audiences, a fact that adds to the humor of the show…but is it also terrifying? Australian audiences are apparently more discerning, so maybe we need to be more like them.

Wall treats the subject mostly with levity, but the larger implications of not being able to trust anything you see online adds a dark undertone. When Wall begins creating deepfakes of deepfakes in the narrative they’re spinning, it’s hard not to consider how these layers of misinformation plague every area of our lives. The scariest part is that we don’t even realize how much misinformation we are already absorbing. Maybe some of it is the truth, made to seem like a lie in order to disarm and confuse. Wall pokes the scale of trust and suspicion that dwells deep in the human psyche, throwing it out of balance and disturbing more than just the relationship between audience and comic. That’s an impressive feat for an extended standup routine.

Despite the insistence that everything was happening organically, the lighting and projections were perfectly choreographed and a huge boost to the humor. Director Zoë Coombs Marr wrings out every bit of humor in Wall’s work.

Breaking the Fifth Wall is equal parts enjoyable, confounding, and disquieting. It’s unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. Go see it, then meet me on Reddit. We’ll try to figure out what we just saw together.