Review: Nick Doody and Doug Segal at the International Comedy Club

Posted by Anura Samara, 29 January 2014

I had told people that this would be a good show. I’ve heard Nick Doody on Mitch Benn’s podcasts, seen him on the Youtube clips for the Distraction Club and I think he’s pretty good.

I managed to get ACTRFS “Pommie Dave” to join us for a beer and burger at Holy Cow before the show.

Nick Doody

Nick’s professionalism shows through in the way that he is so relaxed. He kept his jokes and anecdotes going, neither pausing for too long nor racing through his material. He was willing to admit when he was about to say something but he wasn’t sure how it would go down – another sign that he was completely relaxed.

There was the now standard jokes about the Swiss which will always play well to an ex-pat audience but most of it was material that was geared to a UK audience. That God my parents brought me up as an anglophile so I understood most of what was going on.

The good thing about a comedian like Nick Doody is that he can make you laugh out loud without need to swear (OK, not swear too much) or descend into the more ‘blue’ material.

It was worth turning up to see Nick alone. Little did we know what was in store after the break…

Doug Segal

Doug Segal presents himself as a comedy mindreader and he definitely lives up to the title.

His whole show is really a series of tricks where he engages various members of the audience to select random words and numbers and them “mind reads” to find out what they are. For example, for the first act he threw six table tennis balls into the audience. The people who caught them (including yours truly) had to just think of a number between 1 and 49. We then called out our numbers which he wrote down on a board. He then asked a girl in the audience to take his wallet and remove a sealed envelope from inside – in the envelope was a UK lottery ticket with our six numbers marked off.

There were a few more acts along these lines but the finale was the best. He selected a lady from the audience and offered to teach her his mind-reading tricks. He had three people each choose one word from a clear bag containing 99 words. While we were watching a video presentation of how to present one of his tricks, he ‘taught’ her his techniques. Even she was amazed when she was able to correctly identify all three shows.

One of the nice things was that his act did not involve picking on anyone. Sure, lots of people were selected to take part in his acts, but it was all done with kind humour. The one thing that was weird was that Doug made sure we applauded at all of the right places – in some cases, he gave us advance warning of how and when to applaud.