If you didn’t know much about eBay before, you will after seeing Ruby Carr’s eBae, a show about everything and everything about the auction website as she auditions to be their new spokesperson.
Funny for the sake of it
Carr's jokes and humour are wound into a kind of casual conversations that she engages us with as she pulls us into the deepest, darkest corners of eBay. There are moments where it becomes completely nonsensical where the point is little more than funny for the sake of it, and these occur with increasing frequency as she hits her stride. As she walkes us through her material, and recounts some of her experiences on the site, sometimes the comedy takes a little bit of a back-seat to the narrative. It helps that Carr definitely knows how to work a crowd and how to kick-start a larger reaction from us than what her material might originally receive or what it deserves, but it does take us a while to get to a point where we’re inclined to laugh without there needing to be a kind of restatement of the material.
The way that we're introduced to the show and to Carr herself, is that alot of information, jokes and hyperactivity is thrown at us all at once, in a way that’s really in our faces and just a shock to the system. However, our reaction (or lack thereof) doesn’t deter Carr from continually pulling us into the show with her. It does occur rather slowly, but it may be out of more general confusion initially than anything.
There is an element of self-reflection under-pinning the show, but it comes in infrequently and unnoticeable, so that when Carr shifts her focus to talk about herself in relation to eBay on a more personal level, it doesn't quite hit as impactfully as it might otherwise. And that’s mainly because it’s so hidden beneath everything else that we don’t quite register it as being at all related or more than an off-hand tangent, and instead is just more of Carr’s tendency for rather chaotic storytelling.
As much as Carr tries to turn eBae into a larger, personal hour, doing so slightly detracts from how otherwise enjoyable and funny we find it. This is a very silly, slightly weird show that provides a bit of a light respite.
