Leicester Comedy Festival review by Steve Bennett

Formerly half of musical comedy duo Moonfish Rhumba, Dan Lees’s first solo show has him in the guise of a modern-day clown with a penchant for audience participation, roughly in the Dr Brown mould.

For the first half of his show, he leans heavily on the nervous laughter of befuddlement – with a persona that’s not too clearly defined. His frequent shtick is to get some poor sap, or the whole room collectively, to try to repeat a nonsensical incantation – the first two times relatively easy, the third, as per the rules of comedy, unachieveably complicated.

It’s a little tiresome, especially if audience participation isn’t your thing, and the nonsense enclosing these interactions are more funny peculiar than funny ha-ha. The momentum wasn’t helped by a heckler submitting his own dud punchlines, which was hard for Lees to address directly without breaking character – but even so, the tone was one of the performer just mucking about, entertaining himself, sometimes at our expense.

But about halfway through the tide changes, and the crowd are encouraged to become part of a collective playfulness, rather that the victim of his one-sided pranks. It starts with an oddball parody of the Eucharist, which descends into the crowd contributing names of cheeses with ever-increasing vigour.

From them on we are in on the joke, not the butt of it. In fact, it becomes Lees’ turn to flail as he struggles manfully with an increasingly challenging memory game of his own devising, prompted and cajoled by us. Finally, he has created a dynamic in which we can all have fun.

Review date: 9 Feb 2015
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Leicester LCB Depot