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Brick Wall Comedy
Brick Wall Comedy
Cover image credit: Thumbnail: YouTube · 800 Pound Gorilla Media

I'm Not Doing Well Folks

Dan Rath

YouTube · 2024 · 46 min

An anxious Australian comedian delivers a relentless barrage of bizarre one-liners.

Watch it free on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

Dan Rath spends most of this hour clutching his microphone stand like a life raft, sweating through a rapid-fire sequence of deeply paranoid, oddly specific one-liners. This is anti-slick stand-up. Rath is a low-status performer who communicates in a staccato rattle, presenting thoughts on why the mob went extinct, why he wants to defect to North Korea to escape the burden of choosing between different milks, and how the Australian government turned his car into a metal cube because of unpaid parking tickets.\n\nFilmed at the Comedy Store in Sydney and released by 800 Pound Gorilla Media in early 2024, the special catches the Brisbane-born comedian at a point where his cult reputation was rapidly solidifying. He had recently won the Piece of Wood Award at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, and this performance shows exactly why his peers singled him out. Rath rejects standard crowd-work pleasantries in favor of an unrelenting barrage of joke writing. His bits cover prime numbers, hammers, and the commercialization of ADHD, which he compares to the Jehovah’s Witnesses of neurodiversity.\n\nThe crowd at the Comedy Store seems occasionally unsure of how to handle his twitchy, low-status presence, but the sheer density of his writing keeps the room off balance. He channels his high-cortisol anxiety into an unrelenting series of tight, bizarrely structured punchlines.

The set list

4 bits

  1. Living in a backpackers hostel in Sydney

    Rath describes sharing a bunk bed with a roommate named Julio while listening to podcasts on how to be confident, wearing blue light-blocking goggles, and carrying roller luggage around the CBD without an airport flight.

  2. Indoor rock climbing gyms

    Frames the gym as the place where Dungeons & Dragons meets CrossFit and where incels go to excel.

  3. Parking ticket debt

    Rationalizes seven years of parking debt by comparing it to God—an Excel spreadsheet in the sky with negative numbers that doesn't change the taste of Eggs Benedict.

  4. Being on the autism spectrum and Woolworths quiet hour

    Recounts sympathizing more with the ship in Titanic than the people, and critiques Woolworths' designated quiet shopping hour as an hourglass-timed escape room for Rain Man.

How it plays

Tone
Utterly offbeat, cathartic, dry, and woe-is-me.
On stage
A low-status, bruised and battered persona with heightened cortisol production; described by viewers as an oddly old-school 'joke machine' akin to a 'woe-is-me' Rodney Dangerfield or a more lucid Australian Mitch Hedberg combined with online neurodivergent humor.
Pace
Exhilarating, head-banging, rapid-fire momentum in every sentence with high joke density.
About
neurodiversity and autism diagnosis, parking ticket debt, hostel living in Sydney, indoor rock climbing gyms, prime numbers and hammers

What the critics said

Beyond the Joke praised the routine as 'satisfying, cathartic and utterly offbeat humour...leaving you with enduring and very funny images that are hard to shake out of your mind.'

Summed up from reviews, articles and listings. Sources: 800poundgorillamedia.com, roku.com, standupd.com, letterboxd.com, store.800poundgorillamedia.com, hayleydinnison.com.

Backstory

Centers on Rath's self-described neurodiversity, crushing parking ticket debt, low social status, and experience living in a Sydney backpacker hostel.

Details

Released
Taped
The Comedy Store, Sydney
Runtime
46 min
Where
YouTube
Director
Luke Smith
Topics

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