The first roar of the night comes shortly after Dave Gorman has walked onstage. It is not even courtesy of a conventional joke. It is prompted merely by the screen behind the playful comic springing to life with one of his trademark graphs. This is a man who is so reassuringly witty even his statistics make people chuckle.
Gorman’s latest show, Dave Gorman Gets Straight to the Point* (*The PowerPoint) finds him exploring the online world via snappy stories and comical clips. He has been inspired by the net before, trawling for fellow Gormans and global eccentrics. Here the subjects for his distinctive brand of stand-up sociology include people desperate for fame and the relentless march of selfies.
It is familiar terrain but in the same way that Michael Palin brightens up travelogues, Gorman’s skill is to cast fresh comic light on the familiar, picking previously unseen holes in song lyrics or playing ingenious pranks on unsuspecting cybersurfers. His humour is never cruel. He celebrates life’s ridiculousness and never condemns it.
If the pace is occasionally relentless, he slows it with his wonderfully oblique “Found Poems”. These are compiled from jumbled-up website article comments and delivered under a stark spotlight.
This is not quite Gorman’s best set. That was Googlewhack Adventure, which boasted a truly gripping cliffhanger narrative. But thanks to a winning mix of inventiveness, charm and jokes about pineapples there is no need to draw a graph to calculate that this is an extremely entertaining evening.
This review first appeared in the Evening Standard here. Dave Gorman is currently on tour. Details here.
Tags:
