Andrew Hastings grew up in Manly. His high school's unofficial slogan and aim was to turn "manly boys into manly men". As a skinny, pale, self-professed dork, he's never felt quite like he fit into what their idea of being a man meant. At one point, one of his friends announced that they didn’t actually identify as a man. To top it off, his name also means man. Simply put, Hastings put in a lot of thought about what it means to be a man. And while he's not sure if at 31-years-old if he's surpassed being much more than "a manly boy", he has figured out that you can decide what being a man is on your own terms – even if that means a perpetual state of adolescence.
After a brief diatribe about “fuck boys”, Hastings asks: “You guys ever heard of soft boys?” Between the impatient jeers of drunken hecklers at the weekend crowd of a Sydney Comedy Festival show in a shipping container, he sucks his bottom lip and sighs: “I was the best.”
But when you’re no longer “a 21-year-old with a guitar who is trying to fuck other 21-year-olds”, where do you take that skillset? When your fuck-boy-masqerating-as-a-soft-boy days are behind you, and you’re doing your first stand-up hour since finally letting go of your jet-black emo hairdo, and you’re married, and you’ve got an adult ADHD diagnosis, and you’re no longer messing around with party drugs – what is a soft boy to do? If this show is any testament, Hastings hasn’t quite figured that out yet, but sometimes the search for answers involves a fleshlight. (And if you’re really unlucky, your mum will be in the audience and will need the function of a fleshlight explained to her).
But he’s on his way to figuring it out, and this haphazard show leaves you wanting to know what’s on the other side of this. And he knows one thing for sure – being a perpetually adolescent “manly boy” is better than being a wanker.