Dave O’Neil: Overweight Lightweight

You probably remember Dave O’Neil from the ABC show Spicks and Specks, Melbourne prime-time commercial radio gigs and stand-up comedy. Brad Oakes is best known for stand up on Hey Hey, It’s Saturday. Both have been entertaining audiences since the 1990s. The two have paired up to present a night of good-natured stand up.

Oakes’s set went over well, although given the average age of the audience being about 75, the joke involving word play on the phrase per se seemed to land better than the jokes about how the Covid-era Melbourne 5 km travel restriction limited Tindr options. The humour was reliably funny and well matched with the more famous Dave O’Neil.

O’Neil has honed his genial, wry humour through time in various commercial radio spots. His humour is inclusive and not at all edgy. Seeing his show is the stand-up equivalent of a night out at the pub with a funny friend. His observational comedy mixes nostalgia for the pre-technological age with self-depreciating observations of the indignities of getting older, like the secret CPAP machine club and being told off for your kids for not being politically correct.

Speaking of which, since 2010 or so, there has been an awful movement in comedy to either be deliberately offensive to certain groups to appeal to the “anti-woke” crowd, or agressively defensive of those same groups of people. Neither side tends to be funny and I find myself holding my breath when I see any comedian just in case they stray into one of these minefields.

There was one moment when O’Neil mentioned friction with his son who is taking a Gender Studies unit at Uni. Dave pointed to someone in the crowd: “Do you identify as male?”

I don’t think I was the only one who suddenly freaked out that Dave was going to get himself in trouble.

“Yes,” said the guy.

“Boring,” quipped Dave, getting a big laugh and huge sigh of relief from me, at least.

If you want to escape from the horrors of the modern world and have a fun night out with a couple of genuinely nice blokes, you could do worse than to rock up to see Dave O’Neil and Brad Oakes.

Cathy Bannister