Danny Bhoy: Dear World …, at Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne - 70 minutes

Scotsman Danny Bhoy is a brilliant, easy-going, personable, eminently relatable comedian who has been plying his trade full-time around the world for 25 years.

He is a beloved figure and his patter and banter are just so natural.

I have witnessed none better.

To see him in action is akin to getting into the cockpit of a shiny red Ferrari. It is jaw dropping.

Not only do the jokes come thick and fast, but so too the accents (his Aussie strine is spectacular), along with a superb Donald Trump impersonation.

His latest show, featuring many asides, harks back to another he did a decade ago, when he read out letters to those with whom he had an axe to grind.

Now he has upped the ante.

These are pointed, stinging rebukes that originate from a place of logic and question pompous marketing hype associated with products and services.

But before he gets down to these missives, he ambles onto the stage and begins chatting about how difficult it is to move around Melbourne today.

Why? Because there is construction happening at every turn, which he compares to Berlin in bygone days.

He is mighty quick on his feet, so he immediately reacts to a sneeze in the audience, saying at the height of COVID that would have sparked a full evacuation. Boom. Boom.

He takes a light-hearted dig at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival being promoted as the biggest in the world (which it is not).

That gives him the chance to plug Edinburgh Fringe (which, I believe, is the second largest, after Just for Laughs in Montreal).

He is gobsmacked at the price of a cup of coffee in Melbourne, which leads to a nice set of laughs involving his Scottish bank’s fraud team.

Danny is mockingly put out by the early time slot for his show (6:30pm).

Typically, the best times are later, but he says in Edinburgh he was once given an even earlier gig (4pm). As a result, he expunged expletives, but that backfired.

Latecomers beware. Danny is coming for you. No, not really, but he is not afraid to question their tardiness.

He is in awe of the parenting skills of a father he saw disciplining his son in Southbank. Two words cut to the quick.

Looking back on his career, he references Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky who started out in stand up the same time as him.

And then he turns to a letter to Epson he first read in the 2010s, which questioned the price and method of delivery of printer cartridges.

He bemoans the lost art of letter writing and then heralds a successful one to Red Bull from a Canadian man, which resulted in a multimillion-dollar payout.

On a small table on stage, alongside a little lit lamp are a series of props.

Among them is a packaged product from Clinique, which prompts Danny to read a letter about its anti-gravity eye cream.

Then comes an aside referencing what a funny place Adelaide is and how he likes to be inside there by 10pm.

That leads on to a quick quip about embarrassments and what Scotland’s embarrassment is.

The purchase of a wooden toy at a German Christmas market in his home country results in a sight gag. And there are more laughs to be had from attending his niece’s nativity play.

The purchase of, and claims surrounding, a five-blade razor from Gillette sees Danny fire off another letter.

Vodafone gets a talking to, before he is bemused by the success of a card company in the UK, when others were shuttered.

He has little time for the inflated prices of antiques featured on television programs.

He trots out a show and tell item, being a candle snuffer, which leads on to the inflated prices and outrageous names given to scented candles.

He has a couple on the table, prompting a letter to luxury scented candle maker Molton Brown about a candle it has called Imp’s Whisper.

Madame Tussauds doesn’t escape his derision either.

While taking a swipe at America today, Danny tells us that as a child he was obsessed with the USA and New York in particular.

This is when one of the many highlights of the show – his take off of Donald Trump, hand movements at the ready – comes to the fore.

In turn, that leads onto a tale about his first visit to the States.

That happened when he accepted an invitation to attend an Irish American comedy festival, after organisers mistakenly believed he was Irish, not Scottish.

A personal love story follows and the stick in the mud attitude of British Airways.

The recent naming of the worst airline in the world over the past decade prompts disbelief.

The untimely deaths of Vladimir Putin’s political adversaries and journalists is grist to the mill, so too a geographically localised version of the board game Monopoly.

His old woodwork teacher, who chastised him for being the class joker, gets a dressing down, before he finishes with a letter to himself as a 13-year-old.

The laughs are non-stop and hearty. Danny Bhoy’s style of humour is simply endearing. He is charming and witty and wise.

He even manages to make a heroic comeback from an awkward moment when he probably wishes the Earth would have opened up and swallowed him.

That happened after he playfully called out a patron for the persistent ringing of what he thought was her mobile phone.

This guy is the bee’s knees. Like the rest of the crowd, I couldn’t get enough of him.

That is why he is such a welcome visitor to our country and so many others around the world. Danny Bhoy – bravo!

Dear World … is on at Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne, until 20th April, 2025.