It’s not often that you come out of a comedy show to be offered Excel and Google Sheets shortcut stickers, together with a copy of a keyboard complete with black character stickers.
The man dispensing them was David Benaim, a spreadsheet nerd with some backstory. A former chartered accountant at Deloitte, he was born in the Bahamas, grew up in Gibraltar where he became a maths addict and now lives in Cambodia where he is an Excel consultant and trainer. And his older brother is a managing director at JP Morgan, one of the largest banks in the world.
“I’m also Jewish and gay,” he confides to his almost sold-out subterranean audience as he tears himself away from his laptop at the start of what serves as a personal unbundling of deep-seated issues as well as a deep-dive into the niche world of spreadsheet enthusiasts. The acme, we learn, is the world Excel championships in Las Vegas in December.
So where’s the humour? Well, there are maths puns aplenty from Benaim, 41, a self-acclaimed “piece of sheet”, who sports jeans and a green “I ‘love-heart’ Excel” T-shirt and has an agreeably self-flagellating wit.
“What better place to do a show about spreadsheets than a cave,” he says; later adding: “I tried to work out why Excel is so crap at dates and realised maybe it is because no one at Excel has ever been good at dates.” There’s also dollops of gay sexual innuendo, with Python – the easy-to-read programming language that I’d never previously heard of – making a pointed appearance in one joke.
But there’s also a serious element. Alan Turing, the founding father of computer science and artificial intelligence, who died from cyanide poisoning in 1954 after being convicted of homosexual acts, gets a heartfelt shout-out as Benaim trembles with emotion, recalling how his codebreaking work at Bletchley Park had saved millions of lives during the Second World War.
The technical stuff, illustrated on a screen at the back of the stage, is arguably more for the fellow nerds, of whom there appeared to be a surprisingly large number, than for the average Fringe punter; and, owing to the small size of the print, some of it will be lost anyway on those more than halfway back.
However, Benaim’s fervour for his subject – unsurprisingly, perhaps, he has a YouTube channel with 23,000 subscribers – allied to his winning wit and his courage in exposing his personal vulnerabilities to a cavern full of strangers prove a commendable combination.
David Benaim: Excel Comedy & Mathem-antics
Just the Tonic at The Caves
Until August 30 (not Aug18)
