Dave Callan Presents O+

As an Irishman raised in Australia, hirsute comic Dave Callan has not one but two sets of cultural peculiarities he could mine for material. But for his first Fringe show he has decided to draw from the driest of all possible wells and spend an hour ruminating on the differences between men and women.

The show, which Callan refers to as The Symbol of Venus, centres around the answers given by 100 women to 100 questions in an online survey he conducted. Unfortunately, this means that while Callan attempts to thread these responses together into a comedic exploration of the female psyche, he is relegated to a largely curatorial role. In a sense, he owes his show to the denizens of the internet, spending most of the hour recounting other people's half-formed attempts at humour in an anonymous online survey.

It's a shame, because when he occasionally departs from this mechanical recital, Callan can be very funny. Depite a witty and pleasant stage presence, his early attempt at mild misogyny fails because it is so patently clear that his heart just isn't in it. His timing can be scrappy, and he leans too heavily on a dull PowerPoint presentation for support, but there's a kernel of talent in him that The Symbol of Venus completely fails to exploit. It's not an especially bad show: there are laughs to be had, but it's frustrating to see a talented standup relinquishing control over his comedy to people less funny than he.