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Dan Schreiber is an unashamed geek and not frightened to admit it. He co-created R4's Museum of Curiosity and is a QI Elf and now he brings his love of obscure knowledge to the Fringe for his first full-length show, C*ckblocked from Outer Space, which is packed with fun facts and also a nice autobiographical subplot.
It is the obscure QI-style oddities that grab the attention immediately and get the biggest laughs. Did you know there was a curfew due to werewolves in Brazil? Or that a coconut was once arrested for spying? Or that there was a man in Ohio called Adolf Hitler who refused to change his name after WW2?
Factoids like these pepper Schreiber’s own colourful story. He spent his early days in Hong Kong, where he was nicknamed “Dan Dan”, which he thought was quite sweet until he recently found out what “Dan Dan” meant in Cantonese.
The title of the show derives from the time he was on a date and an astronaut trumped him by emailing his potential amour during the evening. How can you compete with a spaceman? But hey, the tie-wearing, bespectacled, Big Bang Theory lookalike is a geek, he’s not supposed to be a success with women. In fact he explains he even has a “geek dick”, that would rather be at home with a good book or counting the boobs on Game of Thrones.
Schreiber is an engaging storyteller and, as one would expect, has some interesting oddball theories of his own. During a lighthearted section on time travel he comes up with unusual places he would like to go to, whereas most unimaginative people would like to go to great historical events such as the sinking of the Titanic (there's an intriguingly absurd theory about how the Titanic sank that involves time travel). He also gets considerable mileage out of a meeting with Brian Blessed whose every shouty utterance is, as one would expect, comedy gold.
The same cannot quite be said for Schreiber, but this is still a very good debut hour. Comedy silver, perhaps. It’s not really stand-up in the traditional sense, but another example of a trend in shows that fall between stand-up and TED talk. But if you like intelligent, nerdy humour and have ever eyed up a coconut with suspicion you will really enjoy this.
