Zoe Coombs Marr: Dave

Zoe Coombs Marr's standup comic character Dave bounds on stage and begins his routine bemoaning the mysteries of women, encouraging the men in the audience to agree with an enthusiastic, "Am I right?". The rest of the routine is similarly old-fashioned, inviting mockery of Dave's incomprehension at its failure to fly and the retrograde social politics it represents. Brutal physical moments demonstrate the horror of the desperate comic struggling to fill the hour, and audience interaction is knowingly strained. The intent here is to skewer bloke-ish comedy and the audiences that legitimise it through laughter.

But the act lacks precision, in both execution and target. There's no real interior life given to Dave, so he becomes a shapeless embodiment of sexist comedians, rather than a defined character whose misogyny reflects an interior psychological logic. That the artifice is unconvincing is evidenced by the number of times Marr corpses, when surely an act such as this only works if the conceit is unquestionably committed to.

Worse is that it's unclear what is being critiqued here, and to what end. Is Dave meant to be laughable because he's a incompetent comedian, or a sexist one, or an incompetent sexist one? And the whole becomes ideologically problematic when Dave's hyper-masculinity is revealed to be—surprise, surprise—a defence mechanism against his secret homosexuality. That laddish culture is explained away as nothing more than repressed camp feels as retrograde as the comedy supposedly being critiqued.