Jon Bennett Credit: Courtesy

Jon Bennett hails from a pig farm in the outback of Australia, the youngest of four in a religious family. As a vegetarian, pig farming disagreed with his tenets. So Bennett sought the stage instead, traveling and performing around the world for 17 years. 

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. 

Ameri-CAN, formerly known as Ameri-CAN’T, 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. 

Bennett admits to Orlando Weekly that turning traumatic experiences into material for his shows operates as an ineffective coping mechanism. 

“Even when I was being detained for nine hours, there was something in my brain that was like, ‘This could be something,’ and that I needed to talk about them,” he says. “Now that I get regular therapy, my therapist is like, ‘Yeah, you’ve worked out these traumas with your shows, but that’s not exactly the healthiest way to do it.’”

Noted: Do not pursue a career in comedy in place of therapy. 

Ameri-CAN, under its former title, has already earned recognition locally,  winning the Patron’s Pick Award Winner when Bennett brought the show to Orlando Fringe in 2024. 

Bennett’s 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’s found Americans to be amazed by his Australian background and enthusiastic to show him around when he was a visiting performer. 

“The thing that made me want to move to America is that the people were really lovely, really friendly and welcoming to me — a white immigrant. No matter the politics, I don’t think Americans know just how friendly they are to outsiders,” Bennett says. 

Fire in the Meth Lab is another show Bennett is bringing back to Orlando, and it’s a complex, humorous reflection of his relationship with his brother and his brother’s drug addiction. 

“My belief is that it’s the only sort of disease that we criminalize. No one says ‘stop having cancer,’ but you see a drug addict and you immediately judge them and paint them in a bad light. Whereas I think that’s unfair for them, especially having someone who I love go through this and watching that happen,” Bennett says.

In the show, he recounts his brother’s story and how his sibling spent the majority of his adult life in jail. Bennett questions the progression of his brother’s life, evaluating his upbringing and ultimately deciding it is due to something bigger than him. “I think it’s a systemic problem, not a personal one, even though he’s a bit of an asshole,” says Bennett. 

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  that he had just done his joke before this headliner was about to go on. 

“That’s when I started doing more storytelling with real stuff that’s happened to me because if someone else says, ‘I fell into a dead cow when I was a kid,’ then I’ll be like ‘Oh, that’s amazing. Me too.’ You know, it’s got that sort of thing. It was my attempt to be as original as I possibly could,” Bennett says. 

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 in the just-wrapped Fringe Winter Mini-Fest. 

Bennett’s therapist has suggested he hasn’t actually worked through any of his traumas, despite talking it out to his audiences while touring. 

“Now we’re working through these actual traumas that I have that I feel like I’ve put out there, but I haven’t really dealt with them,” Bennett says. “I deal with them by doing shows about them, which people relate to because people relate to humanistic vulnerability type stuff, but really, I haven’t actually dealt with them myself.”

And you can see him try to deal with it all  this Thursday.

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, $29.50-$35.40.

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This article appears in Jan. 21-27, 2026.