Irish comedian Dara Ó Briain talks so fast it’s hard to keep pace, but once you’ve mentally switched it up several gears (Ó Briain urges us to just “listen faster”), his irrepressible glee is contagious. It’s hard to imagine Ó Briain having a bad time and he works overtime to make damn sure we’re enjoying ourselves every bit as much.
Ó Briain’s six foot plus and built like the proverbial (visually, he’s a dead ringer for Gru in Despicable Me), but it’s his big brain that makes him a force of nature (he’s another maths nerd extraordinaire who’s as funny AF: see also Paul Foot). That said, he’s also remarkably spry for such a big fella: just after interval he frolics across the stage, before shutting himself down, “while I’d love to dance for you, that’d be an entirely different show”. Thing is, we would have watched it and it probably would have been ace: Ó Briain’s the sort of preternaturally-gifted freak whereby everything he does is entertaining.
Highlights of the show include his delight in taking advantage of the end of daylight savings to gain entry to a Sydney pub after lockdown, and pondering an appropriate vocation for a koala: his all time fave answer was a guide for the blind (the audience member clarified this by adding that the koala would be a tree-climbing guide, not an all purpose one).
Ó Briain’s knack for quality audience engagement provided other comic nuggets. Ó Briain explains that it’s customary for the front row to be heavy with IT professionals, but tonight it’s comprised of a grave digger and his debt-collecting partner, a porn producer, and a tour guide for the Launceston Tramway Museum. Apparently, the museum used to have 24 trams, but numbers have dwindled to four. Ó Briain’s musings about whether and how the trams had escaped were piss funny.
Laughed so hard my cheeks hurt.
By Meg Crawford.
