Commercially Viable Comedian (Comes with Free Chicken Parma and a Pot!) doesn’t come with Free Chicken Parma and a Pot, but as Dan Brader explains at the start of the show, if you don’t get that irony then you shouldn’t be at his show.
This show launches off with a support spot from Kieran Eaton. Dan introduced Kieran by telling the audience that he’s weird and that we should keep an open mind. As a lover of good absurd and surreal comedy I thought I was in for a treat. But the result was in fact dismal. Kieran’s ‘weirdness’, it would seem, comes in the form of speaking slowly and pausing in odd places. There is a vacuum where the material should be and I’m afraid to say I don’t remember having seen a comedian this lazy, mistakenly cock sure of his own ability and downright dreadful. On the plus side, he made me grateful to see Dan take the stage again.
Dan’s material is observational, and his shtick consists of taking observed situations and extending them out to their logical conclusions, acting out each situation in an exhausting and laboured manner. This became tiresome very quickly and each scenario was afforded five minutes or so, to convey a joke that was weak and obvious at best.
During the course of the show Dan Brader took time to slag off some of the comedians in the festival he perceives as being too commercial. This is very shaky ground for a young comedian to stand on, especially one with no real credentials and no real substance to his own act. The comedians he commented on may be commercially viable, and whilst not generally my cup of tea, they are all comedians with a following and with actual solid material honed over years of working in the industry. To slag them off because they are taking a different course makes Dan seem like a petulant upstart. He would be better served trying to strengthen and hone his own work.
To give him his dues Dan does rally against what he describes as the soullessness of commercially viable comedy, rounding out the show with a story which shows where the title comes from. However, when it comes to supplanting his own alternative to commercially viable comedy he doesn’t really have an answer that works. He talks it up but in the end he can’t really deliver.
The show started twenty minutes late but in fairness this was a preview and the previous show at the venue ran five minutes into Dan’s allotted time. However there was little I could see that would feasibly explain why the show needed a further full fifteen minutes in order to get ready.
This show was a shambolic and unfunny affair and a low point of my festival.
For more info and booking details go to Commercially Viable Comedian