In the past few weeks I have been enjoying Modern Life is Goodish on Dave, featuring Dave Gorman and his PowerPoint slides.

Dave Gorman seems to have found a nice little niche doing shows that owe more to presentations than to stand-up comedy but are nevertheless funny.  I imagine that he would be funny without the slides but I find it hard to imagine him on a stage without a projector now.

It is really difficult to describe what he does and if you try to describe the shows in a way that does them justice. The best way to sum them up would probably be PowerPoint-based whimsical pedantry and I think it is the pedantry that is the key to what makes Dave Gorman funny.

We might spot something that is a bit strange like an overly-specific claim in an advert and just let it go. Dave Gorman will go to great lengths to explain why it is strange, find other examples and do detailed comparisons and then pop up a graph or venn diagram to illustrate it.

See? Doesn’t sound funny at all does it? But it really is.

Having had to put together a few presentations myself, I can see that he is actually very, very good at the technical side of that. Had he decided to do a normal office job that required ambitious but polished presentations he would have done well.

He is also an accomplished photographer as you can see from his Flickr feed, where he shows a good eye for composition.

Above all he seems like a nice bloke and his comedy is almost entirely free of spite and malice. Now I do enjoy and appreciate comedy with a dose of vitriol, I’ve seen Jerry Sadowitz a couple of time, but sometimes its also OK to just sit back and enjoy something more benign.