The internet seems to have triggered a new dawn for conspiracy nuts everywhere. Limitless access to dubiously verifiable information has allowed us to witness the true power of confirmation bias, and marvel at passionately argued YouTube videos explaining why the moon landings were faked and 9/11 was an inside job, along with hilariously confident tweets on why the earth is clearly flat.
Plenty of laughs to be found in this wittily constructed and confidently executed piece of character comedy.
Adrian Gray (the onstage persona, not the person) is one such nut. He wants to deal with the important stuff, the nitty gritty mechanics of how this world is run. He begins with a couple quickfire conspiracies he has been working on, before moving on to his pièce de résistance, a conspiracy surrounding a little-known James Bond film, James Bond: Mission Cheese. That’s the one, Gray tells us, which famously starred the first black James Bond (played by a white actor).
The entire set is delivered in the semi-arrogant, semi-awkward tone of a stereotypical “truth theorist”, as he prefers to be known, while whole-arm gestures inelegantly signal to the tech team to switch between the slides of a rudimentary slideshow full of bold assertions. It’s like a socially awkward TED talk. Gray’s caricatured embodiment of a full-time truther is near-cliché, yet no less amusing for it. And sure, some of the comedy’s a little bit dumb — but that doesn’t make it any less funny.
As is to be expected with conspiracy theories, there is preposterously little evidence for anything Gray attempts to prove. So those looking for the killer evidence of the Illuminati’s secret machinations might be disappointed. As for the rest of us, there are plenty of laughs to be found in this wittily constructed and confidently executed piece of character comedy.
