Melbourne International Comedy Festival review by Steve Bennett

Radio host turned fast-paced comic Scott Dooley has a lot of the skills to deliver a strong stand-up show, but it’s marred by too many second-hand tricks – and occasionally jokes – that fatally undermine that potential.

Too often does he ‘accidentally’ stumble on a phrase, only to have a smart ‘ad lib’ to cover it, which makes the necessary suspension of disbelief difficult. After one particularly well-practised rant, he declared: ‘You’re right, I *have* improvised my way into a corner’. As he surely says every night after the exact-same words lead him there.

He’s learned powerful techniques from freewheeling comics – and his performance seems especially reminiscent of Jason Byrne – but without the actual risk a genuine improviser has. And once you lose faith that a comedian is telling the truth, the damage to the delicate balance of trust is irreversible.

His closing routine, which starts with a lovely and witty description of the decline of KFC, would have so much more power if it felt like his eight-year-old cousin had actually written the funny script he subsequently presents. Maybe seeing four shows a night at a comedy festival heightens sensitivity to inconsequential fallacies, but even if a casual viewer would not notice, to me the hour felt too inauthentic, too often.

There are also a lot of ideas that had been done before; about American customer service being good because the customer may be armed; comparing Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech to the normal dull conversations about dreams, or talking about the changing fashions in pubic hair. But sometimes he had a twist: shameless displays of testicles in the gym – a modern-day observational staple – was told though the filter of a Craig’s List personal ad placed in New York, where Dooley now lives.

The energy of his delivery is impressive, with his breathless conversational style possessing a real vigour. It allowed him to steamroller over a couple of irritating loudmouths in his audience, and while the powerful momentum glosses over some of the cracks in the material, it also maximises the impact of the stronger routines, such as his take on the Adam and Eve myth, which finds a new angle in a much-mocked story.

For a debut, there’s a lot to like, but the moments of obvious artifice are a considerable Achilles’ heel.

Review date: 17 Apr 2014
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett