Dan Kelly: How I Went To Every Supermarket In The World comedy review – Tales from a data collector
The comedian mines his globe-trotting career for surreal stories, sharp laughs and a poignant reflection on the rise of AI
Dan Kelly was a data collector, a human recording device who travelled to supermarkets around the world with a Dictaphone in his pocket, recording the prices of 141 typical consumer goods and services so that companies could set their wages at appropriate levels. It’s a cool story. A couple of years out of uni, he landed the type of job that drifting graduates dream of: offbeat, light on the intellectual labour, with copious exotic travel.
His new stand-up show unpacks his time in the service, as he calls it with tongue in cheek. Various surreal scenarios are relived, from trying to explain to an Iranian bra shop owner that Kelly’s wife’s cup size actually varied, so he’d need a range of prices please, to hunting through the snowy streets of Greenland looking for tofu. The script is sharp and, once or twice, belly-laugh hilarious, with some nice back-and-forth with period voice recordings. Kelly’s ironic presentation of himself as a sort of weathered journeyman comes off nicely. There’s also a poignant narrative arc in the background about the rise of AI and digital ubiquity which brought the era of the data collector to an end.
Dan Kelly: How I Went To Every Supermarket In The World, Just The Tonic Mash House, until 30 August, 7.30pm.