Something a little different for the DVD rental this week - a live comedy DVD.
Also, I've actually seen this before. Well, sorta. Basically, it's been on telly and I watched it then.
I could have therefore not bothered with the DVD, but I've found before that they tend to trim live comedy DVDs down when they show them on telly. Often they don't remove a lot, but it does mean you get some new gags when you watch the full DVD.
Plus in this case, I enjoyed the telly viewing enough that watching the DVD was still funny. And there was some bonus stuff too - nearly an extra hour of material recorded in Dublin in Ireland on the same tour and a "kinda of" commentary which also had David Mitchell on it.
I'd been aware of O'Briain for a while, but mainly form him appearing on panel shows and other comedy stuff on telly. He also does Mock the Week, which I've seen a few times, but never really got into, I have to admit. I mean, I always found him quite funny, but it was on QI I think that I found out he was from my 'neck of the woods' as it were.
I don't mean literally in the way that phrase is often used - I'm not Irish or of Irish descent or anything - I just mean that he studied Physics at University and is also a proper atheist.
I'm a physics person and a proper atheist too, and I was glad to see that this does make it into his stand-up material. If I'm honest it did get a little bit preachy at one point and it wasn't the funniest bit of the show, but it's good when people stand-up and get counted, as it were.
Anyway, the funniest stuff on the DVD is when he's talking to the audience. I guess it's quite old school stuff, but I've not seen it done in a while. What he essentially does is ask people in the audience about themselves and what they do and things like that.
Now sometimes that can be done in quite a nasty way, but here, although O'Briain does kinda take the piss on occasion, but it's in a gentle ribbing fashion, rather than being nasty.
There are also a few more general questions he puts out to the audience in general and he either riffs on the answers or again talks with a particular audience member.
Which isn't to say the whole show is on that improv vein, there's plenty of pre-prepared material. It's also clear he has a kind of 'bank' of stuff that he can go to if the bits from the audience go in a particular direction.
So yeah, it's a good mix of different types of funny stuff and I enjoyed it a great deal.
The extras are also nice. The Dublin stuff is a bit Irish-centric, so some of it just doesn't work - a bit like if you'd never seen Star Wars and he did a Star Wars gag. Still, plenty of it is more general and he does explain some of it, knowing the cameras are there.
The chat/commentary/drinking game with David Mitchell is also quite good. It's a bit random if I'm honest, but there's some funny points and O'Briain is happy to mock his own stuff, so it works well.
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