Review from Dave's Leicester Comedy Festival

Visiting Danish comics Mads Brynnum and Niels Forsberg might have performed their gig in their native tongue for all the sense they made.

In an hour of arcane references to obscure fantasy book series, Magic: The Gathering card games and specifics of multi-user role-playing computer adventure games, I certainly felt I hadn't enough XP to understand much of it.

And if you didn’t get that reference to XP - experience points gained in video games – you certainly won’t get 90 per cent of their routines.

Fair enough, this show was billed as a geeky pleasure, as so many are these days, but neither of them made much concession to the layman. The best comics can talk with passion about their niche pleasures without alienating those who are curious but unknowledgeable – Andrew O’Neill’s History Of Heavy Metal, being a prime example. But Forsberg and Brynnum were not just boring, they were aggressively boring, banging on about topics with little consideration of why we should care.

Much of their material seemed to be the sort of snidey fanboy comments you might get on internet forums, aimed at showing of a tribal superiority, oblivious to the fact it’s not, actually, important. Brynnum took apart some of the illogical plot points in an Iron Man movie – that scientifically rigorous documentary – with pedantry more than wit.

Among other devotees, their observations will have more resonance, but it’s doubtful if that would translate into anything more than a chuckle of recognition, as the jokes are underpowered.

Hardcore gamer Forsberg, for example, banged on too much about how games are not relevant to real-life, in response to those who blame violent titles for atrocities like the Anders Breivik rampage. But mostly this involved him describing scenes in a game and ranting irritatedly in our nonplussed faces how that just wouldn’t happen.

He also complained about the audience’s understandably restrained reaction, the set-up of the room, and the noise bleed from the front bar, where the those who hadn’t paid £5 to see comedy were so audibly having a much better time than the rest of us.

It all just added to the air that this is an hour of cliquey grumbling, not jokes. They should both get out more – or confine their performances to fan conventions.

Review by Steve Bennett

Review date: 16 Feb 2015
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett