Festival of the Spoken Nerd: Full frontal nerdity
It’s not unusual in the world of stand-up comedy for acts to wear their nerdy influences on their sleeves, but it seems science is commonplace in comedy now and it’s gone mainstream. Still standing on the fringes are Festival of the Spoken Nerd, formed by Helen Arney, Steve Mould and Matt Parker.
With the show neatly divided between them, they took it in turns to be the lead – mathematician Parker with his audacious feats of number-crunching and spreadsheet mastery, Mould’s don’t-try-this-at-home experiments and Arney’s whimsical, science-themed songs.
It’s Mould whose bits provided the spectacle, proving that even an audience of nerds is impressed by fire, while Parker’s temporarily misfiring smoke ring gambit, once it came off, made for great fun. Despite being a more natural comic than the others, Arney’s comic songs felt a little out of place, yet the three-piece’s camaraderie and regular attempts to sabotage each other’s bits proved a fruitful source of laughter.
The main criticism which could be made of Festival of the Spoken Nerd is that there were substantial parts of the show where the laughs simply weren’t frequent enough to make this a superior comedy show. In actuality, it’s more of an amusing lecture or a collection of entertaining experiments with a few gags sprinkled throughout.
That’s not to say it wasn’t an entertaining evening – the trio clearly know their stuff and certainly packed in the geeky references, and this is often where most of the humour arose. Science and comedy can definitely mix, but on this occasion it wasn’t the most explosive reaction.