[2013024] Danny Stinson’s ‘Confessions Of A Psych Nurse’
Danny Stinson @ Gluttony – The Pig Pen
10:45pm, Sun 17 Feb 2013
I may have known a psych nurse or two in my time. They may have mentioned tales to me – whilst protecting their patient’s privacy, I hasten to add – about weird and wacky events that may have befallen them in their day-to-day jobs; (ideas of) patients and process and bureaucracy and stuff that just sounded unbelievable.
No stories like that were in this show. No tales even halfway as interesting were in this show.
In fact, Stinson only uses his job as a psych nurse to link together tales of interactions with other nurses – usually, how he tried to pick them up (or the exploits thereafter). There’s tales from nursing school, there’s tales discussing the (glorious, apparently) disparity in gender numbers in nursing… but there’s also digressions into unemployment and more generic comedy topics.
Stinson delivers some good laughs – but I was constantly thinking back to the stories I’d heard from other people, and hoping that he’d drag experiences like that into his act. And, whilst he did venture into some interesting areas, there seemed to be too many tales that had a fair chunk of backstory, but were truncated by a limp punchline and no followup… even when the followup joke was almost blindingly obvious.
I wound up leaving Gluttony unsatisfied; I didn’t find enough of the material I was expecting (and, let’s be honest, that’s completely my fault for going in with such expectations), but I also felt that so much potential was frittered away by not following through with the joke (or by using loose metaphors and not tightening them up). I’m sure Stinson would be able to cobble together a decent ten minutes for a lineup show, but “unsatisfied” is not the best way to be leaving a gig.