Dan Willis is doing two shows at this year’s Melbourne Comedy Festival. First is the show he brought here last year Radiohead, from which he has to rush to get to his second (and new) show “Ferris Bueller’s Way of…”.
There are many strengths to Dan’s work, the most predominant of which being his ability to adapt quickly to the audience and to interact and riff with them. Dan is a natural and genial communicator and sets the show off in an informal and comical manner which recognised the constructs of the room.
Dan has taken the figure of Ferris Bueller as an icon of ‘cool’ and attempted to build this idea into his stand up work. He involves multimedia in the forms of cards with images on them – these are hard to see and are less illuminative than Dan himself whose word pictures are far superior – and audio excerpts from the movie itself – these are brief and cursory and once again lack the evocative power of Dan himself.
Like many themed shows this is a show which hangs stand up material loosely on the theme, which is fine in and of itself. This time though, I wondered why Dan bothered with a theme at all. The link to the film is so intermittent and so tenuous that it might as well not be there at all. In fact it served as an interruption more than anything else. Dan is a strong stand up and could easily base a show on that alone without needing to resort to conceits.
While much of his work strays into areas of fairly standard stand up, the one thing that struck me is the potential in some of Dans more biographical stories such as his story of being bullied and also one of being discovered with someone else’s fiancé. This aspect of Dan’s work is where he’s at his strongest, the self deprecating, biographical stories suiting his somewhat vulnerable and cute persona.
Although this not the manifesto on Ferris Bueller you may expect from the title, Dan Willis has produced and entertaining and funny show which drew in his audience and provided some real glimpses of gold.
This show runs until the 29th April. For booking details go to the comedy festival website