We are regularly told that comedy is dumbing down, but over the last few years it has actually brained up. Robin Ince has been teaming up with Brian Cox, Dara O’Briain has been hanging out with Stephen Hawking and at the forefront of this cerebral take on humour Festival of the Spoken Nerd – Helen Arney, Steve Mould and Matt Parker – have built up quite a live following for their mix of fun and facts.
Their first DVD, funded via a Kickstarter campaign, pulls together their best bits. Physicist Helen Arney does intelligent, whimsical ukelele songs, Parker does the maths, as it were, and Mould makes merry with his experiments. In a change to the usual mixed-bill stand-up format, the other two members of the trio stay onstage at the side and chip in with their own friendly heckles like Stadler and Waldorf while the third boffin does their bit at the front.
The show, filmed at the Bloomsbury Theatre, contains plenty of memorable moments. Matt Parker blowing giant smoke rings – sorry, toroidal vortices – across the stalls and Mould doing a trick with beads falling out of a jar that was also picked up by QI last year. It was a shame, perhaps that one of Mould’s early tricks, basically electrocuting a pickle, was a bit similar to their chum Simon Singh’s party trick that he has done on Robin Ince’s shows. It also seemed unnecessarily cruel to the innocent gherkin.
Their emphasis is equally on entertainment and education with lots of self-mocking gags about binary code, spreadsheets and graphs. The opening old school computer credits have a whiff of the IT Crowd’s credits about them. The audience – at a guess I’d say more spectacle-wearers than is usual at comedy gigs – might not learn that much though as they already seem pretty bright, but I learnt a lot. The project is clearly a labour of love and there’s a nice accompanying booklet and lots of DVD extras too.
Just one nano-sized quibble. To help to fund the project Helen Arney sold her much-admired unique dress with the periodic table on it during the Kickstarter campaign. So how come she is still wearing it during the performance? Presumably there is more than one of them with the elements printed all over it. As is mentioned during the show, “you don’t want to know where the noble gases are.”
Buy Full Frontal Nerdity here.
