“I like meeting people. I wouldn’t be in this job if I didn’t. But…”
So begins Dara O’Briain’s first Cambridge gig since 2012 (“that’s only three years ago – I’m not Kate Bush”). He then shares the frustrations of being recognised in the age of the camera phone. He doesn’t mind people coming up for a chat, he stresses; it’s the cult of the selfie with which he has quibbles.
“I’m not,” he says witheringly, “a unicorn.”
Nor is he Al Murray, as one member of the public announced, before backtracking with, “Sorry, I mean The Pub Landlord!”.
In the dark of the auditorium, as the room laughs, my friend and I share a guilty sidelong glance. Just half an hour ago, we’d approached Dara (with hugely apologetic Britishness) and asked for a picture after spotting him enjoying a quiet plate of arancini on the table next to us in Zizzi’s.
“At least we knew who he was,” I whisper.
As well as the nature of fame, the host of Mock the Week, on the road with his new tour, Crowd Tickler, reflects on the nature of stand-up itself, from ‘encores’ (“I’m going to walk over here, then I’m going to come right back”) to ‘picking on’ the front row – which in this case, he discovers delightedly, is the unsuspecting row E. A rugby coach for 2 year-olds and an expert in medical ‘bone shavers’ give him plenty of sparring material and gets the whole room nicely fired up.
O’Briain’s skill at whittling a laugh out of anything that’s thrown at him is a wonder to watch, and he revels in the bizarreness of the results. During a piece about the formulaic nature of crime dramas, we’re invited to help create a box-set hit ourselves. This nice bit of audience-involving improv turns out a thoroughly unpredictable synopsis involving a detective who goes undercover as a cake maker, ‘suddenly’ discovers she suffers from blindness, before being tortured to death with a wheel of stilton.
A large part of the set is given to his inability to do public emotion – part of why he’ll never go on Who Do You Think You Are, and all of why he won’t shed a tear for inanimate objects, like the drill used to build the Channel Tunnel which was then bricked into the wall (“poor old Chuggy!”).
“Basically,” he concludes, “I’m of F-all use to Comic Relief”.
The theme of the brain loosely informs the second half, as we’re invited to puzzle over why the male brain has decided that the mid-thigh is the ‘sexy zone’ when it comes to stockings. The audience also delivers another comedy nugget when it turns out that we’re the only city so far without a single neuroscientist in the crowd.
Cambridge, he says, has changed since 2012 (“there’s a lot more pulled pork around”) and so too, slightly, has his approach. There’s a more curmudgeonly edge to his rapid-fire humour: we’re gaily giving away the last of earth’s helium in Spongebob balloons, he observes, and we’ve lost, as adults, the ability to eke the most fun out of swimming pools. And for someone generally so inclusively engaging, his addressing the audience as ‘lads’ jars a little.
Still it’s clear that O’Briain enjoys the buzz and unpredictability of a live show as much as us, and his rapid-fire summing up of the evening is excellent, betraying best that excitable enthusiasm which marks him out as one of our finest stand-ups.
Dara O’Briain was at Cambridge Corn Exchange 2-3 October. Crowd Tickler continues in London, Oxford, York and Dublin.
