This is a disappointing show, billed online as storytelling comedy. What it is, is a person flicking through a PowerPoint presentation, occasionally making comments, but for the most part just reading off the slides. The premise of the show is that Caroline Ryan is trying to trying to understand what makes people both young and old tick when it comes to dating. She asks how men and women differ in this regard. Are men cruder than women? Are men more deceptive than women? She tries to get to the bottom of the matter and determine which sex is ‘the worst’ at dating.
Anatomy of Dating just feels stale and cliché
Unfortunately, Ryan doesn’t do a great job of presenting this information – and most of what she has to say comes off as an uninteresting slog. The few good punch lines that appear in the show are not even Ryan’s own; they’re pick up lines that she’s recycling from audience submissions from her shows at Dave’s Leicester Comedy Festival. From time to time she’ll say a few words to a cardboard cutout skeleton set up across the stage from her (‘Bob’), but these bits of banter seem a bit unnecessary, and aren’t very entertaining either.
To be fair, you’ve got to admire Caroline Ryan for getting up and putting this show together. One could only hope, however, that she’d gotten some better material, or at the very least a more fleshed-out story. What she presents in Anatomy of Dating just feels stale and cliché. As a whole, this feels like a very mild and shallow overview of something that most (if not all) people already have experience with. We already know that guys are creeps. We already know that Tinder isn’t a particularly classy way of finding a partner.
