Review: The Accidental Lawyer at The Comedy Store

Reviewed by Priscilla Issa

If The Accidental Lawyer proves anything, it’s that Nick Abrahams has lived what feels like six lives - each one seemingly selected at random by a malfunctioning cosmic bingo machine. He’s emerged as a lawyer, Hollywood creative,  Japanese television nudist, entrepreneur, AI expert, and, apparently, a national treasure. Most people would require several reincarnations to achieve this range; Abrahams has simply been catastrophically efficient, like a man speed-running existence. 

The evening opens with a highlight: audience member Jim makes the rookie mistake of interacting with a comedian. Within minutes, Jim is forcibly rebranded as “David”, and David’s alleged memory issues become a running gag. Jim/David accepts his compulsory identity reassignment with admirable grace, even surviving a collapsing ceiling at the Comedy Store - an impeccably timed “accident” that Abrahams immediately converts into material, threatening litigation before the dust has settled.  Few performers can turn structural failure into a punchline quite so deftly. 

Surveying his Eastern Suburbs audience, the Queensland-raised Abrahams notes that everyone looks eassuringly “rich”, particularly when compared with stereotypes of his allegedly toothless northern homeland. It sets the tone for the evening: nobody is safe, least of all Abrahams himself, who dismatles his own past with the brisk efficiency of a man Marie-Kondo-ing his regrets.

His career retrospective begins with photographic evidence. Year 7 Nick appeared as an extraordinary Pauline Hanson-Elmer Fudd crossover, accompanied by Susan Boyle’s immortal proposition to ‘dream a dream’. That dream involved becoming an important Hollywood creative, but quickly morphs into failing to enter dentistry before falling into law - a profession, Abrahams observes is universally despised until urgently required. Like haemorrhoid cream, it is rarely discussed until circumstances demand it. 

His early legal job applications continue his complicated relationship with photography. While other aspiring lawyers submitted conservative corporate headshots, Abrahams offered Sydney’s top-tier firms an image resembling Peter Allen crossing the Arabian Desert as Lawrence of Arabia. Unsurprisingly, the legal establishment was not prepared.

From here, the narrative becomes increasingly unconventional. After years of relentless work in Sydney, Abrahams lands in Tokyo, becomes entangled in the funerary aftermath of an overworked colleague, and somehow transitions from lawyer to comedian, television personality, and naked freckled fiasco onsen photographed spectacle. The lesson, he suggests, is that success often depends on being in the right place at the right time - and occasionally without pants. 

That philosophy carries him into USC Film School and Hollywood, where the stories begin to resemble fever dreams. Woody Allen appears - photographed unimpressed beside Abrahams. Gene Simmons gifts Abrahams a life-sized resin statue of himself, proving that subtlety is not among Simmons’ virtues. And in what may be the greatest celebrity encounter ever committed to stand-up, multiple Grammy-winner Bill Withers arrives to fix a leak and spend half an hour discussing PVC. Forget Ain’t No Sunshine; apparently there ain’t no water damage either. 

In the 1999 internet boom, Abrahams becomes involved in floating an internet-radio company, followed almost immediately by a half-milliion-dollar Hollywood Hills party complete with PR companies, celebrity wrangling, and Spike condoms. Adult-industry agent Jim South later appears in a photograph, smiling with a boomerang Abrahams has gifted him - an image that feels almost too improbable to exist in a theatre review. 

Eventually, Abrahams returns to Australia, starts a family, and resumes law, hoping to escape  Hollywood’s sociopathy. On his path to partnership, he watches sculpted juniors slowly transform their gym memberships into charitable donations as associates. His later ventures into crypto and NFT law earn him the label “national treasure” - placing him, by his reckoning, alongside Phar Lap. One stuffed champion racehorse. One former naked Japanese-TV laywer. Australia contains multitudes. 

Beneath the glorious absurdity lies a genuinely intelligent argument. The Accidental Lawyer dismantles the fantasy that successful careers follow immaculate plans. Abrahams’ trajectory appears instead to be built from curiosity, courage, questionable photographs, accidents, and an almost supernatural willingness to say, “Well, why not?”

Even his discussion of AI fits nearly into this theme. His observations about our tendency to anthropomorphise AI are sharp, and his warning about model collapse - AI eventually learning from AI-generated material until originality erodes - gives the finale unexpected weight. Should we fear AI? Nick says no. We should understand it, use it, and exercise judgement about what deserves preserving. 

Ultimately, the show’s deceptively profound final message is that surviving change requires knowing what to keep and what to throw away. Abrahams has discarded several careers, conventional expectations, and, apparently, Jim’s real name. 

What he has kept is a remarkably good story. 

Image Supplied