Review by Steve Bennett

I have to be careful here, lest I leave the wrong impression. If I report that Dylan Bailey is so lazy and unprofessional he didn’t put the stage light on so performed in darkness, that he chomped away on a cheeseburger during his show and that he seemed tetchy towards the audience who paid good money to see his show, you might think that this was some kind of ‘so bad it’s good’ anti-comedy.

It’s not.

Bailey hasn’t the first clue about comedy, which he seems to confuse with ‘talking out loud’. There’s no discernable punchlines, nor structure or even point to his ramblings – rather just bald retelling of things he’s seen or read.

For example, you can apparently get Twilight vibrators. What just took me six words to tell you, takes him about four minutes, as he goes into the plot of the film and the middle-aged women he saw watching it at his local multiplex. The description isn’t entertaining, and there’s no gag to be had once we get to the finish; only relief that we’re four minutes closer to the end of the show (though ‘show’ is a very generous term for this shambles)

It’s the same with everything he mentions, from the Christians who tour America in a van on a mission to stop men masturbating, to whatever point he was trying to make about gay marriage. He speaks of his ‘jokes’, but there is no clue as to where they are supposed to be, as he just talks and talks, nineteen to the dozen, in the hope of striking something. Any random person speaking unprepared for 45 minutes couldn’t do much worse.

Occasionally he lets his mic flop forward in a gesture of lazy exasperation, but that’s the only clue that something may, perhaps, be a cue to laugh.

But no laughs, other than nervous ones, come. Bailey is either too under-experienced, or simply too deluded, to evoke anything but bemused silence from a roomful of people who realise they’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake. Let’s just hope they’re not put off real comedy from the experience.

Review date: 6 Apr 2010
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett