Dave Gorman

Dave Gorman (born March 2, 1971 in Stafford, England) is a documentary-comedian and humorist. He performs comedy shows on stage in which he tells true stories of extreme adventures and presents the evidence to the audience in order to prove to them that, unlike in most other stage presentations, it is a true story. He is a former stand-up comedian.

Contents

1 Are you Dave Gorman? 2 Dave Gorman's important astrology experiment 3 Dave Gorman's googlewhack adventure 4 External links

Are you Dave Gorman?

Dave Gorman shot to fame following a drunken bet with his friend Danny Wallace. The bet was thus: Dave claimed that he shared the name "Dave Gorman" with the assistant manager of East Fife F.C. and that there must be "loads" of others around. Danny disagreed with him. So the two travelled to East Fife (from London—several hundred miles), with a video camera, to meet the assistant manager, whose name was indeed Dave Gorman. More trips followed to meet more Dave Gormans.

Thus far the bet was fairly vague, but on the way to meet Dave Gormans numbers four and five, they debated what "loads" meant. Danny decided on one for every card in the deck. That is 54 (including jokers).

To aid the search, which by his own admission became scarily serious, Dave created a stage-show about their travels that was also used to appeal for further Dave Gormen to come forward. The show was called Are You Dave Gorman?. This acquired something of a cult following and several people helped Dave in his quest, which he did eventually complete. (Five even changed their names by deed poll to Dave Gorman).

All this came to the attention of the BBC, who gave Dave a series, co-written and co-produced by Danny, entitled The Dave Gorman Collection, which took the form of televised lectures, in which he explained what he had done. Later a book entitled Are You Dave Gorman? was written by the two of them.

Once the TV show existed Dave stopped touring the show in the UK, instead taking it to several overseas festivals and later running the show for 3 months off-Broadway, a run which saw Dave appearing as a fully-fledged guest on The Late Show With David Letterman.

Two Australian soap operas have named fictional characters Dave Gorman as an in-joke and the comedian has been bombarded with so many e-mails about it that he has had to publicly appeal to people to stop sending him details of other Dave Gormans. He was, after all, only trying to meet 54. At the time of writing he has met 107.

Dave Gorman's important astrology experiment

His second television series was entitled Dave Gorman's Important Astrology Experiment, and was quite a novel and unexpected idea for a comedy show, being based upon the idea of a controlled scientific experiment, although naturally not a serious one.

The premise was that it would test whether or not astrology really worked. Over the course of forty days, he would try to follow any instructions given to people with his star sign in a selection of horoscopes, while his "control experiment" (his twin brother, Nick) ignored them. Each would record the events of each day, and how they fared in each of three areas of life: love, health, and wealth. On each episode of the show, Dave would show footage of the amusing situations he got into by trying to follow his horoscope, and then asked a panel of "experts" in the studio to assess how he had fared in the three areas. Following an audience vote, Dave would display on a "happiness graph" the difference between how he and his twin brother had fared that week, and whether it showed that astrology had produced a positive effect, a negative effect, or no significant effect at all. To reveal its conclusion would perhaps spoil the ending for anyone who has not seen it, and would in any case not add greatly to human knowledge, as it was all just a bit of fun.

Dave Gorman's googlewhack adventure

In 2003 he toured Britain with a show entitled Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure, and published a book of the same name. It is another true story. While pretending to write a novel for his publisher (Random House) Dave became obsessed with Googlewhacks and travelled across the world finding people who had authored them. This show was premiered at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and then went on to sell out for a two week run at the Sydney Opera House (albeit in its smallest venue: Studio Theatre). It also sold out in a major venue at the 2003 Edinburgh Fringe before embarking on a major UK tour of 75 shows in the space of 3 months. It won Dave the award for Best One Person Show at the HBO US Comedy Arts Show in Aspen, Colorado, an award he had previously won for the show "Are You Dave Gorman?" He ended up writing a book about his Googlewhack Adventure which went on to be the Sunday Times Number One Best Seller. During his "Googlewhack Adventure", Gorman had a nervous breakdown which he discusses frankly in the show.

In 2004 a DVD of the Googlewhack adventure was released.

In 2005 he tours the USA with his Googlewhack show.

Before his solo successes, Dave was in demand as a writer, having co-written three series of The Mrs Merton Show as well as writing for many other TV series(episodes?) in the UK. In 2003, he was listed in The Observer as one of the 50 funniest acts in British comedy.

External links

• Dave Gorman's website (http://www.davegorman.com/), which contains sections on:-
  • The Dave Gorman Collection (http://davegorman.com/search.htm)
  • Dave Gorman's Important Astrology Experiment (http://davegorman.com/history_dgiae.htm)
  • Dave Gorman's Googlewhack adventure (http://davegorman.com/googlewhack.htm)
• Interview (http://metro.co.uk/metro/interviews/interview.html?in_page_id=8&in_interview_id=708) – from the 18th November 2003 edition of Metro