@ The Stand, Edinburgh on Wed 11 Nov 2015
There is a sizeable and voluble crowd in The Stand this evening for Dan Clark. Some are fans of his sitcom How Not to Live Your Life, which featured on BBC3 (not necessarily a badge of honour it has to be said, although it is highly regarded) between 2008-2011, some are revisiting this show after its run at last year’s Fringe, and some ‘may be here against their will’, says Clark in typical self-deprecating fashion.
Clark is perhaps a slightly older and wiser version of the bewildered man-child comedians that have proliferated the comedy circuit like varicose veins in a retirement home. Fortunately, unlike many of those acts, Clark is genuinely likeable and ninety minutes in his company is a very enjoyable experience. His audience interaction in particular is very fine indeed and the more vocal members of the crowd are dealt with expertly and relatively gently.
His material itself tends towards the standard. Extended skits on bowel movements and marathon sessions of ‘dancing with oneself‘ – to paraphrase Billy Idol – risk being stale, but Clark puts enough of a twist on these grizzled old mainstays to keep the attention and the laughs flowing, thanks to his willingness to go above and beyond the normal level of detail.
He is at his best when his subject matter is laced with a bracing shot of melancholy. At thirty-nine he has started thinking of himself as being middle-aged and there is a bittersweet moment, unusual in its bald honesty, where he mentions that a lot of his family died young. This leads to some reflections on the awareness of mortality and the questioning of activities that youthful hedonism bats aside with nary a thought. For those in the crowd who are roughly Clark’s age, certain magazine writers for instance, a lot of his musings are uncomfortably easy to empathise with.
Me, My Selfie and I is a consistently funny show that goes down a storm, particularly with the built-in audience that have come thanks to his sitcom. Clark closes with a medley of songs from the series, which he acknowledges may mean little to anyone who didn’t see it. It means the show sputters to a halt slightly, but it’s hard to grudge him a moment to bask in a glow of appreciation and it’s worth for his hilarious contribution to LGBT issues, ‘Tranny with Amnesia’. A little less reliance on some of the more hackneyed subjects would be welcome, but Dan Clark is a very good comedian indeed, especially at finding comedy on melancholy.