Kurt Braunohler usually comes to the UK with queen of kookery Kristen Schaal. This time round he is doing solo shows. I hope he will still be working with Schaal though, as some of their two-handers have felt really special and unlike any other double acts I've ever seen. By contrast this was a gig that was never dull and had penty of laughs, but somehow lacked the USP of the twosome's bizarro banter.
Braunohler's set is called Here's Where It Gets Weird and is basically 55 minutes of the young William Hurt-lookalike talking about himself, every now and again coming to a longer, extended anecdote which segues into oddness halfway through with him mentioning the show's title. The best one involves him recalling an early TV job on a hidden camera show, Prankville, where he freaked out a woman by only talking via a ventriloquist's dummy. It's a great story and all the funnier because it sounds true. In fact it is both a strength and a weakness of this show that all he is doing is recounting unusual true things about himself. Luckily he has a pretty amusing life.
While he is ashamed of working on Prankville he is not averse to the odd clever practical joke in his own right, telling the audience how he used crowdfunders Kickstarter to pay to have a skywriting plane write "How do I land?" in the clouds. Elsewhere he plays the nerd card skilfully, with an anecdote about going to a rave and trying to buy MDMA while wearing a rucksack in the geekiest fashion possible. It would be easy to imagine him landing a part as a boyfriend or older brother in Girls. He could have called the show Embarrassing Sitcom-Style Scrapes. There are further entertaining tales where he is the fall-guy, one involving a double-headed dildo, the other involving an audition with Sacha Baron Cohen.
Braunohler has a simple chatty manner and an extremely likeable personality – clean-cut but not too clean cut, as his old routine about having post-it notes about serial killing on his wall reminds us – but without the snappy interplay with Schaal it lacks the spark to take this beyond just being very good. Which is not to say he isn't also pretty wigged out at times – there are not many comedians who can claim, mid-set, to have been breast-fed until the age of five – but having seen him bouncing off someone else that's what I'd like to see again.
Kurt Braunohler is at the Soho Theatre until Feb 2. Details here.
