Review – NED: Ideas You’ll Never Have

Dylan Cole’s choice to parody TED conferences was an inspired one. These conferences, which are shopped around on the Internet as a series of videos on “ideas worth spreading”, are ripe for a timely send-up. The videos have become popular because they feature charismatic speakers who can make complex ideas understandable and emerging concepts seem surprising and exciting. The talks are usually very formulaic in their delivery, though, and the speakers sometimes strain to make underwhelming ideas seem inspiring and instead come across as sanctimonious or fanciful. This makes for plenty of material for a comic to work with.

Unfortunately, Cole fails to deliver on this concept. Instead he goes broad, and gives us an hour of silliness where he mocks the same academic stereotypes that we never really see at a TED conference. He just seems completely unfamiliar with his source material. This wouldn’t be a problem so much if the show managed to be entertaining or intelligent in its own right, but the audience wasn’t treated to that either. Just some tired meta-jokes (his first character, Dr John Hatzenberger, spends fifteen minutes talking about how we wrote his talk) and a Yoda/Dalai Lama parody no one needs to see.