Richard Dedomenici’s winning comic formula combines silly games, fake songs, satirical mashups, topical pranks and bad gags. A performance artist at heart, the thread running through the show is his 2012 Fake Olympic Torch tour. Constructing a replica from shiny paper, Dedomenici attempted to run ahead of the actual torch, causing mass confusion amongst the crowds, policemen and journalists. Clips from this hilarious but rather pointless stunt give the show some of the structure it desperately needs, punctuating the random, pulsating mass of silliness which constitutes the bulk of the performance.
Dedomenici seems particularly proud of his lyric-writing and filmmaking abilities. He adds words to the theme tune of Cagney and Lacey, the 80s female cop TV show, on the rather obvious theme of ‘lady cops’. He also shows us quite a bit of his ‘Redux Project’, including shots from a remake of Cloud Atlas which received more stars from the Scotsman than the original film. Proof, says Dedomenici cheekily, that his method adds value. The clip is probably one of the funniest moments of his show; on the whole Dedomenici is an amusing man, but some of his are distinctly generation-specific and are likely to go over the heads of younger audience members.
Throughout the performance Dedomenici controls things from his iPad, a decision which leads to him constantly breaking eye contact with the audience and disrupting the flow. More than once the device skips ahead by accident and he has to clumsily correct things. Fortunately, Dedomenici’s style is so informal and relaxed that he quickly gets us laughing again, but the technological set-up does make the show feel more like a lecture on his various comic exploits, complete with dozens of unrelated, silly video clips. In fact, the overall effect is frenetic bombardment of humour, rather than the explosion of hilarity his comic formula purportedly has the power to generate.
