Zoë Coombs Marr’s character Dave has woken from a coma and everything since 2016 is new to him. He has missed the #MeToo movement, JK Rowling’s pivot from beloved to controversial, the entire pandemic, thousands of new cultural references. Coombs Marr’s new show, The Opener, asks, how would Dave respond to all of that? What would this caricature of a hack male comedian have to say about “cancel culture”?
The Opener begins with Coombs Marr explaining that she was asked this question at a dinner party, and felt compelled to create a show that answered it. Performing a “pre-show chat” in her dressing gown, she sets out the context: in 2014 she created Dave, to parody the blokey, toxic masculinity that she’d seen again and again in comedy. Dave was both a comment on how alienated Coombs Marr felt entering the standup scene and a way to address it by shielding herself behind performance.
