Dara O Briain, Alfie Brown, Róisín & Chiara - Mark Muldoon's Comedy Diary

Written by: Mark Muldoon
Published: Sunday 26th March 2023

After nearly 20 years as a household name in the UK, you'd guess people attending a Dara O Briain tour show know roughly what to expect by now.

At this, the Croydon date of his So... Where Were We? tour, he sets about comfortably meeting those expectations. Kicking off with an (at the time) extremely topical Gary Lineker joke, he then details his surprising history of playing Croydon, riffs with a few audience members for a while, then talks about how his life suddenly changed in March 2020. All fairly predictable stand-up fare, but let's not go as far as to say that's a criticism - not when they're such high-quality examples of the form.

After that, what remains of the show largely concerns family, and initially, O Briain's stories are maybe a little pedestrian. Always well told, certainly - few comedians are better at the simple act of charming an audience - but not exactly killer stand-up material. The show is in danger of feeling a little incidental.

The second half of the show stands in stark contrast, dominated by a gigantic and remarkable story about Dara's life that's surprising not just because of its nature, but also what a departure it makes from his previous work. Again, it's very well told - with ample dramatic tension but also mostly with a light touch, despite undertones of justified anger. There's great humour throughout. Best I don't give away much more, suffice to say that 20th Century Irish social history plays a surprisingly significant role. A major departure from his previous work, then, but an incredibly satisfying one.

Clowning duo Róisín & Chiara, meanwhile, return with a show about sex, attraction and beauty standards. It's a show with a freewheeling, fairly chaotic feel to it - perfect for its late-night weekend slot. It's also heavy on the audience interaction, and pretty energetic: I'd feel tired performing it, and I'm nowhere near as pregnant as Chiara is here. That also provides an opportunity for Róisín to discuss fertility anxiety, which plays out with her literally tossing eggs out into the audience.

It's good, stupid fun, asking worthwhile questions in joyful ways: why does Madonna strive to look as young as possible? Beauty standards are parodied (teeth-brushing, for example, becomes a competitive sport) before ultimately being rejected: in the end, the duo want to make it clear that you're absolutely fine as you are.

Alfie Brown, finally, is a comedian who was probably thinking his career was starting to go quite well: in August he scored a prized Edinburgh Comedy Award nomination, following it up last month by debuting on Live At The Apollo. That was, however, until last week, when a 2015 stand-up clip of him using a whole load of racist swear words was surfaced on Twitter.

The clip is as unfunny as it is offensive - a pretty impressive achievement, given how offensive it is. Before he became the focal point of all this online attention, however, the comedian performed the aforementioned Edinburgh award-nominated show for a final week, at Soho Theatre.

There's a section of the show about Greta Thunberg, which forms one of the clips that has been circulated online. It's been edited harshly prior to being posted, key context removed in order to maximise outrage. Here, in full, the humour is still near-the-knuckle, but it successfully stays the right side of the line - its underlying comedic argument is a solid and funny one. Elsewhere in the show, he utilises his own bipolar diagnosis in order to question at what point there'll be too much discourse about mental health.

The show has taken its time to get to this stage. An earlier version appears on Amazon Prime with most, if not all, of the best moments included. That version feels padded out with filler material, however, or jokes that are shocking more for the sake of it. This is a problem for comedians like Brown: when the core idea of a comedy routine isn't good enough to justify how coarse the material is, rather than just being average stand-up, it instead becomes actively unpleasant.

It's currently uncertain whether or not Brown's career will survive this storm. You don't have to think too hard or for too long to name comedians who have managed to maintain careers after doing worse. But this hour of comedy, at the end of a long lifecycle, is an excellent one, finely and precisely carving its way through a range of sensitive subjects. He comes across as something of an expert on the nuances and sensitivities of modern society, and how his position, as a straight, white male, sits within that. Which, in part, makes you further question how he got the balance so wrong eight years ago.

There would be a slight irony if his career ends at what appears to be exactly the moment when he nails the temper of his stand-up persona, but the subjects he chose to tackle in the clips circulating online - race, the Grenfell tragedy, paedophilia - are, it's fair to say, delicate ones. It's probably important to have got your tone right a little earlier in your career. New comedians might want to learn lessons from this, and cut their teeth on lighter topics, before deciding whether or not they're going to tackle this kind of stuff.

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