The Festival Theatre was packed on Saturday night for Fran Lebowitz, a singular, defiant and very funny public intellectual, who’s currently touring Australia and New Zealand.

Onstage, Lebowitz recalled her early years growing up in the 50s and 60s. While Lebowitz was completely uninterested in school, it turns out the school system wasn’t interested in her either, expelling and suspending her – once for “usurping the principal’s power” – and forcing her to earn a certificate of high school equivalency on her own.

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Ironically, when she moved to New York shortly after, she made money by writing papers for university students, early proof that she’s always been smart, has always trusted her smarts, and was never swayed by the opinions of those around her who are less smart, her school principal included. It makes sense that one would need such resistance and confidence to raise oneself from magazine column writer of the 70s (which gave her fodder for two collections of essays in the late 70s and early 80s) to one of the most iconic cultural critics of any given time.

For decades Lebowitz has been a political and cultural commentating mainstay in and of New York, a focus which could, in a parallel universe, make her too niche. But people around the world are infatuated with New York, and Lebowitz is a quintessential New Yorker, someone who scarfs down the city’s identity whole. When one audience question from her new show An Evening with Fran Lebowitz gets her talking about the absurdity of American politics and its current trade as anxiety-production machine, the next question – “Where is the one place you’d most like to visit in the world?” – has her answering, quite simply, “New York.” At 75, would she be surprised that some of the audience laughing at the paradox are in their 30s? The diversity of the audiences’ age, which seems to reach into the 80s, is twofold: Lebowitz’s sheer longevity, and the popularity of the Grammy-winning 2021 Netflix docu-series Pretend It’s a City, directed by another quintessential New Yorker, Martin Scorsese.

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The first half of An Evening with Fran Lebowitz finds former Adelaide Writers’ Week director Louise Adler opposite Lebowitz, while in the second half Lebowitz is standing at a podium, answering questions from the audience pre-sourced from a QR code given in the foyer before the theatre doors opened. Neither Adler nor the audience waste much time in getting stuck into Trump. But aren’t we talking about him more than what’s healthy? And what can Lebowitz say, anyway, that hasn’t already been said? In her trademark button-down shirt and blazer, blue jeans and cowboy boots, not much, actually, but it’s the way she says it that makes people listen so intently then burst out with a more-than-occasional laugh.

Unapologetic, satirical and assured, lesser discussed topics of the night were attending the Nobel Prize for Literature with Toni Morrison, the rights of cigarette smokers such as her proud self, and her guest appearances as Judge Janice Goldberg on the American television show Law and Order (“What people need to know,” she says, “is that I judge all day.”)

Wry and hypercritical, Lebowitz is a true story weaver, whose anecdotal style embraces pointedness as readily as tangents. Her biting take on America under Trump and how long it might take to recover is not overly hopeful. Her theories come across as hard truths, but also hearty truths that invite ready mirth. It’s a gift, what she does. She’s a gift. Proving she’s not strictly an American treasure, Fran Lebowitz is an uncut gem.

An Evening with Fran Lebowitz was presented at the Festival Theatre on Saturday May 23