It’s not quite clear whether Alex Kealy’s The Fear is a confessional or a general self-reflection that spirals into a cyclone, but what occurs onstage is a steady deluge of material that oscillates between the binary points of very funny and downright hilarious.
A career defining show
There’s almost a David Hyde-Pierce/Niles Crane-esque energy to the set as over the course of the hour, Kealy links a kind of dry and logical analysis of landmark moments in his personal life to the current context of reality. There’s a direct and succinct rationality to Kealy’s set as he plays around with concept of ‘show not tell’ in its application to his own self-described tendencies of over-analysis to the point of applying a level of indiscriminately destructive rationality, whether it’s to an abstract concept like planning a wedding or something more personal like the comedic art from.
Initially, Kealy quickly fires off a series of political jabs, warming us up to the hour, relatively simple jokes compared to what the rest of the show has in store. The political references that he makes are quite recent, almost making the political comic’s curse of relevancy appear relatively over-exaggerated. This eventually snowballs as the pace shifts to something comparatively lethargic, taking more time and space to build up images of the most ordinary things, which builds into a bubble of anticipation that Kealy detonates at will. Often, he layers several comedic techniques from every aspect of his toolbox in order to build a joke, as if going for the most technically complicated gag possible, before doubling back and unspooling it for us so that we can see why we’re laughing.
There’s a constant building and deconstruction within each contained segment that drives the show forward. It’s the ebb and flow of these connections that constantly fire like neurons and tie ideas that would be far-fetched in any other environment together. There’s something about the precision and technical skill that he operates with that the closest equivalent to what he does might just be a composer showing us their written score so that we can follow along and visually see the melodies, countermelodies, thematic repetitions and key modulations that create a symphony. Kealy shows us how the music (jokes) comes together from their disparate parts, and we enjoy it all the more that we can understand exactly how it's put together. Anyone can be funny, but Kealy takes comedy a step further and creates something so technically clever that it's almost beautiful.
In The Fear Alex Kealy mixes humour with an eruditeness that creates the most complicated web between jokes. In unraveling the mysteries of comedy and showing us the cogs, this hour becomes the exception to the rule about how the explanation devalues the joke itself. Kealy instead shows that it can be just as if not more funny than the original source material. The Fear is a career-defining show. Definitely make sure that you’re there to witness it for yourself first-hand.
