Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

There are comedians who make you laugh, those wise masters who can make you think and those coveted people who you can find empathy and warmth within. To find someone who can control all three mystifying forces of human nature is to behold someone you can believe in and share life and a shred of existence with.

For a man with more cultures infused into his soul than a football club suddenly being taken under the wing of a multi-billionaire to stand in front of an Edinburgh Fringe audience and grasp that all important necessity of making what they say relevant to all and being able to talk without impunity on a series of subjects, Patrick Monahan really does have something very special locked away in his comedy locker.

There is no hiding behind the exotic background of Mr. Monahan, in fact he revels, quite rightly as we all should, with pride but not ego, with flair and charm but not self interest, and through his mother and father’s passed down heritage of Iranian, Iraqi, Irish and his own wonderful sense of poor planning Middleborough. Patrick Monahan gives the audience inside the Gilded Balloon a taste of that culture that drove him to where he is today, reminiscing with the sly smile of a man who understands the importance of such things, the Disco Years for which if Abba, a misplaced understanding of the phrase Black Gold and the ability to make more moves than a octopus holding down every button on a PlayStation controller, he would perhaps not be here today.

Disco Inferno perhaps but the story behind it all, whilst overwhelmingly entertaining, as funny as you can handle it being, also had the very real pathos that makes life rich and worth living, worth spending time in the company of someone who has lived that all mixed heritage can bring and to whom being able to say I bring you ice cream in Farsi meant that bullies in Middleborough schools left him alone but not in the way anyone would think.

Disco may be part of the decade that fashion forgot but in Patrick Monahan what came across as he talked of calories lost whilst doing certain dances, how liberal Iran used to be and how every man should rail against having four wives, for women are far cleverer than men and would never stand for having four husbands, was a man who knew all the right moves and who used them to great effect inside the Gilded Balloon.

A man to spend a lot of time on the company of, funny, erudite, intelligent and very special, Patrick Monahan is a comedian’s dream.

Ian D. Hall