Colm O'Regan: Dislike! A Facebook Guide to Crisis

Colm O’Regan opens his show with a promise of—sound the Comedy-killing Phrase Klaxon now—“lessons we can learn” from Facebook and the Irish debt crisis. But the best part of Dislike! A Facebook Guide To Crisis involves neither social networking nor the IMF bailout, and we all learn something about the legal system.

Irishman O’Regan boasts the dubious accolade of once being informed in a solicitor’s letter that his material “went far beyond what is accepted as comedy”. It’s a gift to his show so great he’s put it on the poster. Yet the comic’s context for this memorable correspondence is just a little too jumbled to do it justice, comprising a tangle of Powerpoint and standup that clumsily works in Mills & Boon, the internet, Irish history and O’Regan’s own life.

He excels while quipping his way through his family album slides. The likes of “I look like I’ve just been let off a sexual assault charge,” or “these shorts are so short I think I handed them down to myself,” perhaps explain why the show takes Facebook as its fulcrum. Those are some brilliant photo captions there. 

But in the analogue world of standup, O’Regan’s delivery is rather too rigid and rushed to generate the proper laugh breaks his monologue demands. The neatly scheduled callbacks leave him no option to drop earlier spiels that fall flat, as some do. A Facebook friend, yes, but O’Regan’s real world request is pending approval.