Bobby Mair: Obviously Adopted

That old grumble by standups about reviewers giving away their punch lines – you won’t be hearing that from Bobby Mair. Few publications would dare print the depths-of-bad-taste delving clinchers this lank-haired, scraggily-bearded, firmly frazzled-looking Canadian spouts (I’ll be promptly burning my notes after filing).

“I’m Bobby, and I’ve done about as much cocaine as I look like I’ve done,” is Mair’s blunt introduction, immediately setting the tone for a trip inside the mind of a proud societal dropout whose favourite pastimes include women, drugs, drinking, drugs, taking drugs in forests, drugs and, yes, drugs.

In here somewhere lies promise for some Bukowski-esque lowlife illumination and bloody-minded self-analysis surrounding his struggles with mental illness and a deeply dysfunctional relationship with his adoptive parents. But Mair seems determined for the most part only to try and shock, by playing fast and loose with jokes about, say, falling asleep on prostitutes while high on mushrooms, pinching his dead stepmother’s dildo, and violence against women (the line about bruised 16-year-old girls in the basement – just no).

He seems to get increasingly exasperated by his inability to solicit any strong reaction either way from the audience, but to expect mass laughter or walkouts is to underestimate how much this kind of shtick has become depressingly commonplace. It’s a shame, because Mair’s delivery is strong, in a manic kind of way, and that streak of genuine, reckless fearlessness in him could be put to clever use if he ever fancied literally cleaning up his act some. Easing off the drugs might be a start.