When asked what he does for a living, British comedian Dave Gorman has a difficult time answering the question. That's because, according to him, no one else shares his profession. You can see for yourself what he does, starting next week at UCLA's Macgowan Little Theater, where Gorman will perform his one-man show Dave Gorman's Googlewhack! Adventure as part of UCLA Live's 2004–05 program. The production previously played a successful three-month run in New York that ended in mid-January and, before that, won Gorman the jury award for Best One-Person Show at the 2004 U.S. Comedy Arts Festival. The show has also toured in England and in Australia. The UCLA production, playing March 23–April 10, will mark Gorman's first time performing in Los Angeles.
Gorman's piece tells the true story of his obsession with an obscure Internet word game called "Googlewhacking," in which the goal is to find a combination of two words that yield only one result when entered into the Google search engine. Accompanied by a cleverly presented slide show, Gorman recounts his chaotic travels around the globe three times in search of face-to-face meetings with the names behind the Googlewhack "hits." Gorman's previous show, Are You Dave Gorman?, which received a Drama Desk nomination and also won a jury prize at the HBO-supported U.S. Comedy Arts Festival, was based on a different obsessive odyssey which, again, took him around the world: Gorman tracked down 54 men sharing his namesake.
"What I found exciting, professionally, in the last few years of my life, is that it's very hard to describe what I do in terms of other people, so other people have to invent their own label for it," said Gorman. He began as a standup comedian in England, but he found storytelling to be his artistic calling in 1997, when he mounted his first one-person show, Reasons To Be Cheerful, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The closest someone has come to best describing Gorman was, according to the performer, a journalist in Britain who coined the phrase "documentary comedian" to describe him. Said Gorman of his latest show, "I guess it is a documentary, because I tell true stories and I present the evidence. I think we're very used to seeing comedians lie, and we know when they're playing with the truth. When we see a comedian start a joke by saying, 'I was walking down the road the other day,' he wasn't, and we know that, and he knows that we know that, and no one cares. And so I've ended up in a position where, because I think that's what people's expectation is, I will prove to you that it's the truth. There is no way that you can come and see this show and leave thinking that I made it up."
After the L.A. engagement ends, Gorman plans to take his show on a U.S. tour. After that, he has no idea what's next, which admittedly scares him. As he explained, it is during his idle time that his adventures--and misadventures--tend to occur. He offered the following analogy: "I think the adventures themselves are like heroin, and telling people about them is like methadone. So, right now, I'm heavily dosed up on my methadone. I get all of the thrill, all of the excitement, all of the drama, and all of the passion condensed into that hour and 40 minutes onstage with the show--with no danger. Nothing can actually go horribly wrong. It's nice. It's safe. When I no longer am telling people this story, that's when I worry."
Fortunately, there are a lot of people out there looking forward to hearing about Gorman's next escapade, wherever it may take him.
"Dave Gorman's Googlewhack! Adventure," presented by UCLA Live in association with WestBeth Entertainment and Jam Theatricals, Mar. 23-Apr. 10, at Macgowan Little Theater on the UCLA campus. For more information, visit www.UCLALive.org or a Ticketmaster outlet or call (310) 825-2101.