Guest review by Emma Maguire

Uth­er Dean is sad and he wants you to know it.

My Fat/Sad is a com­edy and a tragedy, a bal­ance between joy and ser­i­ous­ness, and a show with more of a dual­ity to it than you might be expect­ing. In my des­per­ate quest to avoid spoil­ers, I’ll leave the show’s struc­ture as that.

Laden with pop cul­ture ref­er­ences – a heck­ler at our per­form­ance had par­tic­u­lar trouble with the mere concept of Game of Thrones - and music­al inter­ludes, Dean’s wit is incred­ible and he’s not afraid to point out the irony or meta nature of some of his jokes or the com­edy world on a whole.

Dean is charm­ing, a tad cocky, and very, very likable. It is his demean­or that keeps the show mov­ing stead­ily for­ward, des­pite some of the dark­er sub­ject mat­ter.

You might laugh, you might ‘awwww’, but there are times you might just be silent, unsure of what emo­tion best fits the situ­ation. There are points with­in this show where con­tent hov­ers on the edge of dis­com­fort, but it nev­er falls into all-out awk­ward­ness. This show is the sort of thing that might feel a bit new and unique for the aver­age com­edy-goer.

And that’s fine. It’s fine to go to a com­edy show and real­ise that not every moment has to make you laugh.

For a com­edy show that explores a few more emo­tions than the usu­al, and has a rad pre-show playl­ist, check out My Fat/Sad.

My Fat/Sad is run­ning at 9.00pm every night between now and Sat­urday at BATS theatre in Wel­ling­ton. As a warn­ing, it con­tains sig­ni­fic­ant men­tions of men­tal ill­ness. Get amongst!