John Lynn: Social Notworking

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before. An indignant Irish comic has something to get off his chest. An itch to scratch. Don’t know if you’ve spotted this, but in recent times, the Irish economy’s been in a bit of bother. Mercifully then, after what’s become increasingly overfamiliar fodder on the Fringe, John Lynn doesn’t dwell for too long on the fiscal hard times of his homeland, instead explaining his exceptionally tenuous show title Social Notworking (“It’s sort of about the fact that it’s the things you do that define you”) before reeling off a bunch of unrelated anecdotes about his various career mishaps, drunk girlfriends and a few bon mots about the disingenuousness of ADHD in children (“symptoms include short attention-span, high energy and a low boredom threshold… wait a minute, that’s ALL children!”).

It’s pretty standard fare, but the supremely confident, devilishly handsome Lynn comes into his own with some repeated—and very measured—audience patter and one laddish but perfectly metered gag about the time he got caught short whilst recovering from a colonoscopy dosed up to the eyeballs on super strength laxatives.

There are a few titters of recognition when Lynn sketches the lengths he’s gone to to impress a woman (including running and jumping naked at a life drawing class) as well as some amusing portraits of his 30-something friends who really should know better.

He ends, humbly, with a very gracious “thank you for coming” and though it’s hardly been a life-changing hour of killer comedy, on the whole, we’re glad we did.