Comedy as catharsis! From the moment he comes on stage and constantly repeats his age, we see that The Comedian is obsessed by the passage of time and its inevitable result. His signature joke betrays the obsession with death that underlies so much of his humour, and even as he uses sex, drugs and laughter to escape his morose fear, it is ever present. Ironically, he shares this prescription to assuage his pain with a doctor friend, but then, someone enters his life who suffers from cataplexy, a condition which the stranger says means that he could actually die from laughing. The Comedian's modus vivendi is challenged, and he must come to realise that what he is actually fleeing is not the inescapability of time and death, but the realities of life and love. Marcelo Dos Santos has written an insightful, and sometimes brilliant, show that explores the dark sources of comedy and exposes how a painfully self-aware, yet equally self-deceptive, individual can transmute fear into humour
