You could write theses on comedy’s relationship with social maladjustment. Many a standup, we imagine, was once an awkward kid making people laugh to fit in – and not all of them grow out of that awkwardness. Dan Rath is a comic as uneasy in his skin as the most afflicted of classroom misfits, barely meeting our gaze as he rattles off one one-liner after another. Happily, those one-liners zing as zingily as any in town, disruptive little thoughts that flagellate Rath himself and flip the world upside down – or at least reveal it anew through the downturned eyes of a man excluded from its pleasures, and liberated from its pieties too.
You could compile an entire joke-of-the-fringe list from Tropical Depression alone – although no reputable outlet could publish it without a trigger warning. Rath’s is a bleak worldview, forged in rejection, medication and alienation from the humbug of modern life. Zero per cent alcohol? Ghosting? ADHD? Our host has a skewed take on them all, and he’ll leave it planted in your head. Then there’s the running commentary his performance provides on its own, in-the-moment failure: Rath is like an anti-comedian in his fidgety refusal to allow momentum to build.
The difference from anti-comedy, though, is that these gags are pearlers. Look at his joke about the ironies of Ozempic distribution, say, or the one about Rath and his brother being prescribed lithium: in both, classic joke construction marries with audacious leaps of the imagination to brilliantly animate the Aussie comic’s political and personal way of seeing. Most of his material combines embittered social alienation with scepticism of fashionable nostrums, as when he sees a “Live Love Laugh” embroidered on a cushion by an enslaved person “doing the opposite”.
There’s no shape or theme to any of this. That would compromise the conceit of a fragile outpatient who seems inadvisedly to have found himself on stage: “Usually,” he deadpans, “my carer has tasered me by now.” Let us be glad they haven’t, because there’s fun to be had in the space between Rath’s painfully introverted performance style and a joke-world that’s fantastically expansive.
• At Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh, until 24 August
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