I'm Not Doing Well Folks

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.