So bad it gives you cancer

29-07-2009


Right, so it has been a few days since I was exposed to this tripe and I feel I can share it with you now without the urge to kill being too strong.

Last Friday the girlfriend got us tickets to go see Colin Murphy at the Carlsberg Comedy Festival in Dublin. I have only ever seen him perform on the idiot box and for as long as we have been going out the girlfriend has been singing his praises for live performances. During her university days he would do regular gigs at a nearby comedy club, so she knew that his live performances were worth seeing.

So off we went to catch one of the masters at work. There were three comedians on that night, Colin, the MC whose name I can't remember and an American called "Neil Hamburger".

Now. The MC was fantastic, he really was. He had some excellent jokes, was able to loop back jokes to make later ones funny and earlier ones seem even better. Really knew how to get the crowd going.

Colin was brilliant as well, living up to the hype that the girlfriend had built up prior to the gig. He was what I would like to aspire to be someday. My sides actually hurt after the laughing from some of his material.

His support act (the guy that goes on beforehand to warm up the crowd) was Neil.

Now this guy was dreadful, I mean dreadful. For a start he was doing a character on stage. That sort of comedy is dead, much like the drag comedy act is. Lily Savage isn't Lily Savage anymore and even Eddie Izzard has toned down the makeup. It just died out is all, it isn't that funny anymore. The same applies to comedy acts that get up on stage to play the part of somebody else telling a joke.

Another thing that bugged me about this guy was that he had cheat notes in his pockets which he kept looking at for his jokes. Now, a personal thing when I perform on stage, I like to have all the material in my head. If I go and forget a joke I forget it, make a joke about forgetting it and move on. I might remember later, I might not. But I feel that if somebody paid in to see me perform the least I can do is have all the material in my head. This guy must have consulted these cards every three minutes. That is just downright poor form for an act that people have paid to see. An act that is supposedly big.

But he may as well not have bothered with the joke cards, because his material was so bad that I think it gave me cancer. The funniest thing about his entire forty minute set was when the girlfriend nudged me in the ribs and said "Look at Colin Murphy behind us."

I turned around and lo and behold there is the man himself, doubled over laughing with tears streaming down his face. When he got on stage the first line he said was "I have never laughed so hard at how an audience didn't react to a comedian."

Which pretty much sums up how dreadful this guy was.

But don't take my word for it. Here is a video of the useless git, from three years ago. Funnily enough all the material he used here was the exact same at the gig last week.





If you enjoy anything about that video other than when it ends then you don't know what comedy is and I will ask you to never again visit my site.

This has been a comedy health warning from the surgeon general.

Blue_jester

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