Before the rollicking fun and bone
achingly hilarious Dave Gorman we had to endure the introverted pseudo-nerd
acoustic ramblings by music comedian Jay Foreman. Fitting the bill as a warm up
act for a main act that never reaches tepid, Forman took the audience on a
tedious acoustic journey with songs about stealing food and the royal wedding.
Never weird enough to be Bill Bailey funny and never clever enough to be Flight
of the Concords – Foreman is pretty forgettable, except to one gentleman behind
me who almost got a hernia from laughter.
| From the 'Dave Gorman Wears a Jumper' series, where he had to wear as many jumpers as he could for a whole week |
Performing to an almost completely
sold out Cambridge Corn Exchange, you could be fooled into thinking that there
is something funny about Dave Gorman. For this 30+ middle England audience
however, I suspect they were paying £20 a ticket to be comforted, warmed by the
inane familiarity of Gorman’s material and perhaps even pleased by his 1st
year university lecturer style that makes them think of younger days. Gorman is
in fact best understood as a supply teacher or junior lecturer who rather
fancies himself as a comic, rather than a comic who fancies himself as someone
who can impart any interesting information, which he avoids with admirable
consistency.
Gorman was not forgettable, quite
memorable in fact, but for all the wrong reasons. As with every single piece of
stand up or show based comedy he has ever done it is exclusively all about HIM.
This show took the form of an analysis of Gorman’s thickly packed CV, allowing
the audience much craved insight into his religion, diet and day to day life.
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| 'Who let Gorman in the lab!?' - *havoc ensues |
There are two main problems here. Firstly,
for a comedian to take you on a journey through his life it is important that
he is at least affable. Gorman doesn’t quite fit the bill here. Towards the end
of the show, one crowd members was on their mobile phone to the furious outrage
of Dave Gorman. He proceeded to march down the aisles and confiscate the
individual’s phone, looming over them with the imposing aura of an elderly
gardener he shouted: ‘Give me your fucking phone!’ and then balanced it on a
jug of water hoping it might vibrate and fall in. Admittedly, the person may
have been illegally filming the show, but his reaction, instead of informing
the front of house staff, was characteristic of an aggressive and dislikeable
comedian.
The second major problem, besides
the fact that his material is simply unfunny, is that the root of it is drawn
from the supposed absurdity of his real life. The premise for ‘Are you Dave
Gorman?’, ‘Googlewhack Adventure’ (and all the rest) has been to recall to the
flabbergasted audience how bizarre his life has been over the past few years.
The message being ‘look how bloody kooky I am. I am so bloody kooky that I set
up a real twitter account for a fictional character created by the HTC
marketing company...so you don’t have to.’ To which the audience applaud, cheer
and probably cry with laughter at the prospect that someone could live as mind-meltingly
surreal a life as Dave Gorman seemingly has.
But it is important to remember
that he is only doing these stupid things so he doesn’t have to write any
actual material! The implicit humour of the show lies in finding his real
lifestyle funny, but he has no real life
as everything he does is seemingly for the purposes of his comedy shows. In
being self-consciously wacky his life is in fact almost entirely fictional!
When he tells us that he ate loads of berocca, asparagus and beetroot to see
what would happen to his piss, he is lying. He did this to provide something
funny to talk about in his show so as to avoid the painstaking process of
actually thinking.
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| Another proposed BBC pilot show where a group of drunks wait for Gorman to make a shit joke in a pub and then beat the crap out of him. He wasn't smiling by the end. |
No sane person lives the life he
claims to have done. No mentally stable person spends an entire year collecting
a group of people with the same name as them (‘Are you Dave Gorman?’) just
because they feel like it. Indeed, if you did that and did not use it for
comedy material purposes you might genuinely be investigated by the police as a
real lunatic. If we are, therefore, to buy into Gorman’s totally bonkers life
stories as being real, which is imperative if the comedy is to work, then we
are laughing at a man who has literally lost his mind. We are laughing, as the
Victorians did with their freak shows, at a man who is actually mentally ill.
The greatest irony of all is that our unwavering fixation with this mental
elephant man leads to ticket, merchandise and DVD sales which only further
encourages management to perpetuate the process as they tour him ragged, no
doubt caging him up in the back of a horse drawn circus carriage as he wails
and pleads at passersby.
| - 'Please get the fuck off my doorstep, you're not funny' - 'But I'm wearing a hat!' |
If this is the case, if his life really is
this weird, if he really is that mental
and spends his days tracking down the authors of internet googlewhacks (‘Dave
Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure’) then any human with a sense of empathy and
pity would do the right thing and stop the perpetual motion of wackiness, stop
funding his illness. The best thing you can do to cure Dave of his malignant
quirkiness is to stop buying tickets to his shows or books or DVDs. Please.
