Making a mockery of his gruelling schedule

Jun 6 2008 by Andrew Welsh

INVITING comedy boffin Dara O’Briain to round off his epic UK and Ireland tour in the Fair City was a masterstroke by the Festival of the Arts organisers.

Best known as the host of BBC Two’s topical panel show “Mock The Week,” O’Briain (pictured right), completed 50 live performances in 75 days with a hilarious turn at Perth Concert Hall.

People may say the man should know what he’s doing after getting in so much practice, but it’s to the Irish stand-up’s credit that he showed no signs of being jaded after such a gruelling schedule.

Appropriately then, the pitfalls of live performance figured prominently in his material, describing with gusto the dubious pleasure of seeing a magician stiff in front of a blootered and hungry crowd of rugby fans, besides assorted bizarre incidents in hotel bedrooms.

O’Briain is an educated man – he studied maths and theoretical physics at University College Dublin – and his comedy scattergun took aim at the pseudo-sciences of homeopathy and spiritualism, while memorably protesting against the advertising world’s obsessive war on bacteria.

In another eye-watering skit, O’Briain aired his complete disdain for gyms, ironic considering the raw physical energy that helped lend a manic edge to the funnyman’s routine.

With a full house at his disposal, it was no surprise to see the 36-year-old turn to the audience itself for laughs, and his trawling of the front row yielded up a Tesco van co-ordinator, a jewellery designer and a teenage upstart who described himself as a “doctor of everything.”

Such human fodder was manna to O’Briain, who proceeded on a merciless satire that ingeniously provided reference points for the entire show.

Even a Cancer Research scientist failed to escape the big man’s deprecating gaze as outlandish fantasies of superheroes and mutants abounded.

Not for the faint hearted, O’Briain doesn’t mind dispensing the expletives, but unlike so many modern stand-ups his material never verges into the distasteful and no one was ever likely to leave out of offence.

His two hour-long sets didn’t push back the frontiers of stand-up but rather made for a compelling and insightful evening’s entertainment.

In the words of the man himself, you had to be there.