Review: David Trent, Comedy Box

On Saturday night David Trent drove to Bristol, with dub reggae blasting his 40-year-old ears all the way and £2,000 of computer equipment loaded on board, just to teach us about the internet of things. He delivered a Powerpoint presentation – and he delivered a riot.

He explained at the start that “there’s not really any jokes, its just me going ‘look at that shit!’ or occasionally ‘what the hell is this shit!'”  And, as a reviewer I’m not sure whether to be pleased that Trent has provided me with such a concise summary, or annoyed that he has pre-stolen what I was going to write. Anyway, the point is that it’s accurate, in that instead of making jokes, Trent mainly presented for us a slice of the best of the worst of the internet, let its raucous madness pump through his veins, and embodied its delirious energy.

It was as though Trent was assembling a museum of the future as envisaged by our late-stage-capitalist overlords.  The artifacts on hand included the smart mattress which pings your smartphone if your partner is cheating on you, an internet connected fork to “give you feedback on your eating habits” and a vibrating alarm clock that you keep in your pants to wake you…up.

The volume was loud, the visuals were popping and the woman sat next to me was weeping in big, body-shaking gulps, her hands over her face. She was very positive at the end though, so I decided they must have been tears of laughter rather than pain. In any case in these circumstances the distinction was inevitably blurred; the room was a heady cocktail of over-pumped serotonin, giddy nerves and a twist of nihilistic dread that will be familiar to anyone who grew up binge-watching epic fails on YouTube with their mates.

I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that Trent was showing us all this stuff, yet didn’t have an over-arching story about what it all meant. So we watched a disturbing cartoon clip that Trent’s children were obsessed with, and then dissected the comments, and it was really slick and hilarious – and maybe that’s enough. But the fact that this dead-behind-the-eyes CGI dystopia of algorithmically mashed-up popular search terms emerges, inevitably, from an economy that monetises children’s attention – that remained unaddressed.

But maybe that was just my preoccupation, and I could only feel it even more acutely because it was so clear that the whole of the Comedy Box was absolutely loving it. I also considered the fact that leaving the barrage of content somewhat unanalysed, might actually be a more fitting reaction to the hyper nature of web 2.0 where nobody’s going to hold your hand and explain everything, and everyone knows the dankest memes stay in that weird space where you’re not quite sure whether anyone even knows why it’s all so damn funny.

Maybe the most concise summary came from a featured Brexit voter vox pop:
Journalist: “Any particular reason why you…?”
Voter: [interrupts] “No.”

David Trent performed at the Comedy Box at the Hen & Chicken on Saturday, April 14. For more Comedy Box lineups, visit www.thecomedybox.co.uk

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