David O’Doherty Will Try to Fix Everything

David O’Doherty, one of Ireland’s most beloved quirks (or quarks), is back in town for Melbourne International Comedy Festival with his show David O’Doherty Will Try to Fix Everything. An ambitious title, yes, but an hour of chortling does wonders in the short term.

If you compare O’Doherty to a few years ago this year’s show has an infinitesimal whiff of melancholy about it. He talks about how life is so very good for a jobbing comic at his level of success, but that invites you to wonder how happy he really is.

He says he’s nearly happy – ‘If I can’t be happy, what chance do you have?’ and weaves a story into his show about seeking out a wise woman in a remote part of western Ireland in order to find the secret of happiness. It could be a pizza wheel; it could be a girlfriend (me, me! In our house David O’Doherty is known as ‘your new daddy’), but it’s not to be found in the weirdness of celebrity culture or by buying ‘boutique eggs’. He has a go at the sort of butchers who insist their animals are slaughtered in an especially humane fashion (‘they strangle the cows to death with bunting’) and he wonders how Toblerone came to be seen as a luxury chocolate and sold at airports.

O’Doherty tells a painful story of his first ever gig at Edinburgh when all seven people in the audience (a group ticket win) walked out. Compare that to a later story about going into what he thought was his room in a hotel and disturbing a man lying naked on the bed and watching him, O’Doherty, on TV. ‘I stuck my head in the door, looked at him and then disappeared like the weirdest ghost ever.’

O’Doherty’s comedy is based on observations, ‘what if’ questions and small moments of shared absurdity, sometimes in song, accompanying himself on his Casio keyboard. It is delightfully daft and insightful; his show is low key and he never labours a joke, or scarcely even points you in the direction of one; he lets you work it out for yourself. Fifteen years experience have given him graceful timing. And If O’Doherty can’t solve everything then at least he knows who to blame for it – Lance Armstrong. O’Doherty does a lovely riff on the disillusionment created by Armstrong’s vivid fall from grace.

I didn’t shriek with laughter at this show like I have done in the past, but I certainly didn’t stop giggling. Comedy is so much horses for courses: I prefer a meander of the imaginary kind to rapid fire one-liners; fans of O’Doherty know to expect the former. A mathematician apparently described him as ‘infinitely annoying’, and, as O’Doherty notes, when a mathematician uses that word, you take it seriously. David O’Doherty is a natural, by sheer virtue of who he is.