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Don’t come to Dan Rath’s new show expecting something coherent. “It doesn’t make sense,” he mutters after one joke. “It doesn’t have to, the way we’re going.” What you can expect is one of the highest joke-per-minute ratios in the Melbourne international comedy festival.
Help Me Please begins with a musical interlude, stretching until you can feel the audience begin to wonder if something has gone wrong. This pause is the only moment of stillness in the show – from the moment Rath steps on stage, he delivers a relentless string of one-liners and short bits back-to-back for the full hour.
The description of Help Me Please on the festival website is three short jokes with nothing connecting them. Before seeing the show, this feels unhelpful; afterwards, it is difficult to imagine another way to sell it. The speed and frequency of his jokes is dizzying. There are no careful segues or an overarching story. It’s all just jokes. Buckle up.
The audience is never given time to relax, as Rath plays what he describes as “whack a mole” with the pockets of laughter that bubble up across the audience. This is not a show that hits everyone at once – different jokes resonate most strongly with different people. The hardest I laughed was a bit about vending machines, while my partner was doubled over during a section about a cancelled psychology session. It doesn’t matter that not every joke will hit you with the same intensity because the sheer quantity of material means you won’t wait long before something tickles you again.
It feels as though this show could build to a point of hysteria but Rath refuses to let momentum catch. Just as one joke begins to resonate, we are careening in another direction. Rath counteracts any rapport with the audience by attacking the front row with painfully awkward questions about blood work or their toothbrush buying habits.
Towards the end of the show Rath discusses the content warnings now part of MICF’s comedy listings. He says a previous show of his was listed as containing “themes”. This is the closest we get to an overarching thread in Help Me Please – in response to this content warning, all themes have been removed. It is, he says, “a series of non sequiturs strung together by mental illness”.
Rath’s comedy is also clearly influenced by his neurodivergence, which he has spoken about on stage before. I have wondered, since receiving my own autism diagnosis, if I am attracted to writing about comedy because it is such a magnet for neurodiverse people. Watching Rath’s comedy is what being autistic can feel like – bouncing from one thought to another, never really sure which ones are a universal experience and which are symptoms. Rath is not trying to be relatable but his shows speak directly to the experience of being a misfit, constantly out of step with society’s endless unspoken rules.
Help Me Please is not a show for everyone but somehow it is still very easy to recommend.
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