Is it worse for a show to be bad or mediocre? At least if a show is actively bad it sticks in your memory. Maybe not for the right reasons, but it’s on your mind, it made some kind of impact on you- just not the sort of impact you lay down your comedy fest dollar for. A mediocre show doesn’t even give you this artifact of the mind to cling to. Five minutes after you walk out of the theatre you barely remember what you’ve been doing with your evening, the result was so bland. It’s not bad. You don’t have an unpleasant time. You might even have laughed, although you’ll be very hard pressed to remember any of the jokes. You might vaguely remember a song at the end that was okay.
This, for me, was Jimoein’s show. There was nothing particularly awful about it- in fact the sold-out Athenaeum crowd I saw it with seemed in absolute stitches- several people declared, walking out, that it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen. Fair warning: If you see him from the upper circle he is far away enough to appear about the size of your fingernail and as a lot of his jokes seem to rely (or at least lean heavily on) facial expressions, you might miss a lot of the subtleties from a distance- the material does not seem to suit such a large venue. Although saying that, it seems like, as a rule of thumb: the larger the venue, the blander the comedy. I really feel like I could just switch the titles on the Arj Barker or Akmal reviews and they’d all come to much the same conclusion- there’s nothing too terrible here but, by the same token, nothing too great here either. It’s just… there. Not recommended.