Bland and boring – what else can be said about Matt Price’s new Fringe show, Broken Hooters and Geezers with Shooters? This show is simply Price demonstrating to the audience the art of reducing a party-pleaser story into a boring presentation with a simplistic PowerPoint.
Matt Price is a Cornish-born, Cardiff-based comedian and in this show, he reveals the true story of his journey into the criminal underbelly as he sought revenge after his wife was brutally attacked. He has a lot of dark and wild stories about a colourful array of former criminals, including The Boss and Stab Vest Steve.
The show is quite the disappointment from beginning to the end. Throughout the show, one cannot help but wonder how such an amazing and potentially funny story about former criminals is being made dull by a supposedly ‘great storyteller’.
Firstly, he makes the mistake of deciding not to use the microphone. At first, this seems like a great way to lift the imaginary barrier between the audience and the performer. However, it starts irritating the audience after the first 20 minutes as Price gets more and more inaudible. It would be a wonder if the people at the back could hear him at all.
At the beginning of the show, Price makes sure the audience thinks of him as a criminal yet ensures that we never forget that he is ‘not a violent man’. He is so overly apologetic that when he jokes about the lifestyle of the criminals the show stops being a stand-up set and becomes more of a serious lecture about the topic. Every single potentially funny joke becomes meaningless and slightly disturbing in such an apologetic atmosphere.
After failing to get laughs from his audience, Matt Price becomes so incredibly self-conscious that he turns to the reviewer, who sits there conspicuously with a notepad and a pen, and reveals that he is aware that the show is not going great. Whether this statement should be taken as a joke is unclear, but his lack of self-confidence gets a few sympathetic giggles from the audience.
One highlight of the show, and probably the only one, is when Price tells the story about a prostitute calling him ‘vanilla’. One can confidently say that that is, in every meaning of the word, what he and his show are – at least he himself is aware of that.
Matt Price: Broken Hooters and Geezers with Shooters is on at Underbelly Bristo Square – Clover
At 18:50 until 25th August
Book tickets here
Image: Steve Ullathorne