David O’Doherty is looking for happiness. He’s doing this by following his whims of what he thinks will get him there; from buying a new jacket to getting a girlfriend. Each one of these brings inevitably only temporary relief from the perceived day to day misery of his life. It’s jollier than it sounds. Through this he adds his trademark lo-fi Casio accompanied singy-shouty songs. This is business as usual for O’Doherty. He’s carved out a niche for himself with this sort of thing and he knows what works.

And work it does. While this show is unlikely to win over the unconvinced, to those on board with his style it’s an excellent way to spend an hour. Each of his routines regarding his self defined routes to happiness is expounded with exquisite phrasing made to look effortless. There’s even a smattering of politics and a song skewering sinisterly cutesy advertising jingles. Perhaps his tune about women’s preferences for the wrong kind of man skewers to cliche subject matter but he sells it with style.

The structure of his attempts to get happy constantly failing can come across as repetitive moaning but O’Doherty anticipated this with an imagined heckler; profanely berating him for being such a privileged whinger. When an actual heckler pipes up saying what he heard as ‘fuck the Catholics’ he puts her down with a quite wonderfully bizarre bit imagining the heckler to be a reformation time traveler. Far beyond your usual club putdowns. I was near the heckler and she actually shouted ‘stop laughing’. Quite the strangest objection to have at a comedy show.

Though the ending of the story isn’t the revelation it’s set up to be, an encore of one of O’Doherty’s classic songs brings a fine closing to a solid show by a performer incapable of producing a bad one.

Paul Manderlay