Nick Doody
Nick Doody opens with a rather overdone little video taking the piss out of Orville and some pretty lame material about how awful crowds of drunk Englishmen are, and his delivery could be more assured. Those things said, I loved this man's stand up, once he got into it. This point came almost exactly when he launched into the material squaring up against fundamentalist Islam ("Whenever I do material about fundamentalist Christians, someone will come up to me after the show and say 'Oh, well done taking on the Christians. Easy target, aren't they? Why don't you take on the Muslims?'.. Ok then.").
His route into this subject is the Sudanese Teddy Bear Crisis, and all told this subject provides a good half of the hour long set. So it's a good job this is fertile ground. Doody is perhaps less interested in offending any particular group, more interested in the simple idea of offense. Islam is an obvious place to start, but this is broadened by the use of his own offensive teddy bear, which goes to great lengths to offend any group it can find ("Richard Dawkins touches kids!"). As such, Doody manages to avoid aligning himself with anyone he might not want to.
Some details of his set might not be top class, with the material about the surreally bastardised songs his grandmother used to sing him coming across a bit forced and overwritten-without-achieving-much. But this set has at its heart the structure of a really great standup gig, with real thematic ideas interwoven skillfully in the material. The hard work of making a satisfying stand-up set has been done here, it is simply the individual jokes which could, in places, be a little better delivered or slightly rewritten.
I'll definitely see this guy again if he's back next year.
4/5
Thursday, August 07, 2008
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