Dan Schreiber: C*ckblocked from Outer Space @ Underbelly Bristo Square

Dan Schrieber lives his life by the phrase, “Wrong place, right time”. By the end of his show it’s the mantra that he tells us helped him get a girlfriend, explains how the enigma code was cracked and how a rare breed of monkey in China was aided by an altruistic zookeeper in passing a peanut. 

Schreiber is a trivia nut and committed to living his life serendipitously, but it’s his trivial fact obsessed mind that is the fulcrum of his show, which opens with a PowerPoint presentation of zany real life happenings. For example: a mayor in Brazil has put his town under curfew because of werewolf sightings. And a coconut in the Maldives was arrested for being a “spy”. These things, Schreiber explains, in this age of reason 2.0, remind us that there still is some magic in the world.

C*ckblocked from Outer Space is pleasant way to spend an hour of your time. Schrieber, aside from being a standup also makes radio shows for BBC4 – and it shows in his conversational style and confidence in his content. He oozes affability. But there in lies the problem.

C*ckblocked... suffers from a peculiar weakness. Schrieber's candour masks what amounts to be a weak thesis statement. In a show marked by chat on how we need to embrace the bizarre and idiosyncratic, he has a decidedly binary framework in which his theories operate. It’s all about being a geek versus not being one, and championing geekdom – but Schrieber works a lot in broad strokes and as he talks about geek culture as this homogenous identity, it ceases to mean anything; his attitude feels like something out of a 1980s ‘slobs vs snobs’ or ‘nerds vs jocks’ teen flick. He explains that he is a proud geek and that he only embraced this recently (along with the ‘wrong place/right time’ ethos) that he never wanted to be a geek in the first place because people think of them as introverted and goofy. But in his hands they are a flock of benevolent, celibate fools – like the hippies from Hair (minus the sex). They just want to make the world a more interesting place, man. In his spiel about Game of Thrones actress Emilia Clarke refusing to go topless in the next season of the show, Schrieber recalls his friends devastation and explains that for geeks, “THAT’S ALL THEY HAVE!” 

So despite the carpe diem charm, there’s an unappealing whiff of condescension throughout the whole show that distracts from the amusing anecdotes that he tells well. Which is unfortunate because I’m sure Schreiber is a talented journalists – but his self-centred and dated cultural pontificating is just boring.