Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

Not being neurotypical can be a superpower in comedy, granting the vision to make connections and spot absurdities that escape everyone else. And Dan Rath has that in spades, distilling off-kilter leaps of logic into inventive, absurd punchlines with more than a grain of truth. 

The flipside to his brilliant gags is an intense awkwardness. He delivers with the thousand-yard stare of a man who’s seen too much, and uncomfortable silences fill the show. Momentum is not something he’s concerned with, and he’s more than content to let a collective nervousness hang heavily in the room, filled only by the hum of the air-conditioner, until he can puncture it with a joke. And when he does the laughs from a top-notch line are amplified by the relief that the social tension has been broken.

Even so, some non-sequiturs are just a bit too out-there to land, though it’s a price worth paying for the more imaginative punchlines whose creation almost defy explanation, and of which he has plenty.

Surprisingly, his chronic introversion doesn’t stop him from engaging in some audience interaction, methodically working through the rows, right to left, brusquely asking everyone about their job. Sometimes he hits dead ends or grasps for links between the answers, but equally often, a reply will trigger a fresh train of thought, just as quirky as the prepared material.

That his experiences are not like his audience’s is underlined by his hand-to-mouth existence on the edges of society, where he lives in a backpackers’ dorm just a spitting distance from where he grew up in Brisbane. He recognises that bits of his real life will ‘leak out’ over an hour, but the alienation he allows us to glimpse adds context to his eccentric thoughts.  

Rath conjures beautifully surreal images from his Parallel universe, on anything from bees to caffeinated energy drinks. But there can be a point to this, too, such as exposing the tokenism of supermarkets offering just one ‘quiet hour’ for autistics to shop, or noting that the one percenters never actually seem to enjoy their wealth, in stark contrast to the way bogan lottery winner does.

It’s a fine mix of bleakness and absurdity, delivered by a man who’s both visionary and loser, and whose lack of concern about building a connection to his audience means he’ll never pander, delivering his weird worldview on entirely his own terms.

Review date: 3 Apr 2023
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival