Dan Rath is a lanky Australian whose body language is so awkward he looks as if he’s wearing a coat hanger under his shirt.

 

He has a habit of whacking his forehead against the microphone – whether a joke goes badly or well.

 

In a Fringe where neurodivergence has become the norm, Rath, very convincingly, claims to be a pioneer of the genre.

 

He says he has never watched a movie or grasped a metaphor.   His account of the wretchedness and poverty of his existence is Dickensian in its scope.

 

 At one point he thinks he might be having a stroke on stage and you almost believe it.  His crowd work is stunningly incompetent to the point of genius.

 

Rath tells mundane stories about shopping in the supermarket or travelling on a plane and makes them spectacularly weird. His accounts of the world are peppered with extraordinary details and accompanied by a non stop mental dialogue which sometimes dissolves into sound effects and random noise.

 

Somehow, out of this total chaos, Rath conjures huge surprising hearty laughter.   His observations are so bizarre they allow him to draw ludicrous but strangely logical conclusions about reality.

 

He has alarming theories about insects and an alternative ending to the Titanic.  He’ll deliver completely useless advice about how to talk to crack addicts.  Everything he says is apparently unhinged.  It’s a wild, scary ride.

 

But he’s a great and reliable comic and he brings each anecdote safely home with a dangerous whack of the microphone on the head.

 

It’s satisfying, cathartic and utterly offbeat humour – and it leaves you with enduring and very funny images that are hard to shake out of your mind.

 

Listening to Rath is like stepping into an alternative universe.  It’s crazily unpredictable but you’re cushioned by the knowledge that another mighty big laugh is always just around the corner.