Posted by One morning I was idly swiping left through the internet when a show announcement caught my eye: comedian Matt Wright appearing at the Old Courthouse on Thursday, April 11th, 2024. Sure, I had never heard of the guy, but it was “som’n t’be at” (as they say ‘round here) and that “som’n” was the Old Courthouse, a mere handful of staggering steps away from my door. I would normally “be at’ the Old Courthouse for their regular Thursday night trivia anyway – which this show would clearly be pre-empting – so I paused my swiping finger long enough for a quick search.
I found a couple of old clips and the guy seemed funny enough. The ad said that he had been nominated for a couple of Junos and that he’d be recording a comedy special soon so he had obviously been at the comedy thing for a while, and his tourdates page seemed to indicate that he was usually performing in significantly larger venues than our little eighty-seat Courthouse.
Good enough for me. I asked m’lady if she wanted to go and she shrugged so I jumped on tickets.
We were seated at a table with Cathy and Terry, a couple we had recently met at trivia night and who run the nearby gas station. Turns out they were old friends with Matt Wright’s parents, and Terry had even taught Matt in school for a year or two back when they lived in…was it Gander? Suffice to say that if you’re a “small world” kind of person then you’d love Newfoundland. Six degrees of separation my arse! ‘Round here it’s one-and-a-half, maybe two degrees, tops.
After a brief chit-chat the opening act (who’s name I forgot the moment I heard it) came on and killed a dozen minutes with under-rehearsed, less-than-great material. I think it was him that gave kudos to the Old Courthouse for saving everyone so much time by choosing that for their name. He pointed out that had they had called the venue anything else, when people wondered where this new place was the answer would invariably be “It’s in the old courthouse”. So by eliminating that now-unnecessary question-and-reply compounded by the amount of times the question would come up, well, the bar has saved the area hundreds of years.
Like I say, he didn’t seem to be on top of his game.
Matt Wright took the stage wearing jeans and a loose-fitting plaid shirt, looking much less dapper than he does in his promo photo, which shows him wearing a suit that he probably borrowed from his dad. He started strong and stayed that way, staying consistently quite funny throughout his set. I was impressed with how patient he was; he didn’t worry about filling every moment with words, instead just smiling and rolling his eyes to the side whenever he needed a few seconds to prepare his next line. I could never do that, not even in regular dinner party conversation. Which is probably why I don’t get invited to more dinner parties.
Oh, he did a bit in the middle that I had come up with a few years earlier, about meteorologists on the news and how they are so needlessly informative. “You don’t have to show your work, just tell me if it’s going to rain tomorrow!” I had come up with that exact line. He had a better delivery though, ‘cuz he said it out loud and in front of people.
Like I say, the whole set was really good. He did some crowd work that he made funny specifically because of how poorly it went, and m’lady was particularly impressed with how “clean” he was (especially after the, um, biologically specific material we heard during our last comedy show at the Old Courthouse).
I thought Matt’s ender was super funny mostly because of how brave it was. I forget exactly what he was on about, but he finished an anecdote by pointing out how unfulfilling and anti-climactic the ending had been, and then after a brief pause he shouted “Thank-you, good night!” into the silent void and stormed off the stage. It was such an odd way to end the show that Matt Wright was already halfway across the room before the audience realized he was serious and finally broke out into the long, enthusiastic round of applause that he deserved.
Good show. Recommended.
M’lady and I paid our bill before running into some friends in the bar downstairs so we ran up another tab before going home. Around here it’s sometimes hard to have a drink with everyone you run into, but I keep trying.
Todd Man Out 