Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

Very few comics pack as many jokes into every minute as Dan Rath does. And never obvious ones, either. His mind works like no other, and the onslaught of inventive punchlines is relentless. 

His autism is his superpower. He sees the world in a unique way, allowing him to throw new light on familiar situations and condense offbeat notions into pithy phrases, that, while odd, are strangely precise. You can guarantee no one else is using ‘queefed out by Optimus Prime’ as a punchline. 

Rath is not the sort of stand-up you’d ever call relatable, yet the observations are so sharp you can understand how he got there, even if the route was beautifully idiosyncratic.

His social discomfort means he’s not a relaxing presence on stage. And a wretchedness pervades his low-status persona that’s so far down the Greek alphabet that being even a beta would be an unachievable aim. Nor does he have any shame as to what miseries he’s willing to share: he’s the sort of person when asked ‘how you going?’ will tell you, and in extreme detail.

But if he’s a loser in many aspects of his life (‘I’m not doing well, folks’ has long been his catchphrase)  he’s a gold medallist when it comes to inventive, hard-hitting gags – with that grim outsider, status bringing a potent nihilism.

In recent shows he’s pushed himself out of his comfort zone for long chunks of stilted crowd work broken by clunky off-kilter comments. He’s wisely limited that here – there’s enough to-and-fro to generate a fug of comic awkwardness, but he End it before that slips into the genuinely uncomfortable.

And it does offer a change of pace from the onslaught of exquisitely crafted off-the-wall one-liners – every one so eminently quotable, but also so quickly forgotten as you’re immediately hit by the next nugget. Truly, an embarrassment of riches from a unique comic voice.

Review date: 7 Apr 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival