Who’s Your Daddy?
CAST: Chris Forrest
VENUE: Auto & General Theatre on
the Square
UNTIL: Sunday
RATING: ***
In Chris Forrest’s newest one-man show, the answer comes in the form of a ubiquitous audiovisual display of the nappy brand, Huggies. For a little more than an hour, Forrest shares his experience to and of fatherhood, while flanked by a flipchart on one side and a large, yellow banner of the brand – complete with a sleeping baby’s face dead-centre – on the other side.
It makes sense to partner with a brand that encompasses parenthood for a show about fatherhood, but it is also distracting. Especially when, towards the end, Forrest mentions how Huggies Gold is the best for your babies’ bottoms. He is sure to say upfront that his opinion is not a shameless plug, but it takes away from the funnies.
There are plenty of slap-your-knee funny moments in this show. In a linear fashion, Forrest talks about his journey with the help of that flipchart which divides the story between “Trying,” the trimesters as well as finding out about the gender of his baby among other things.
This is a great device to use in front of people who don’t have kids to follow what can be an alienating subject.
Forrest is good at putting the audience in his shoes by sharing his fears: “Will I have enough medical aid, can I afford private school, what’s going to happen to my wife’s vagina?”
His wife and her behaviour during pregnancy is a major part of building up to the jokes. But even though he asserts that pregnant women are crazy, Forrest is careful to make himself the butt of the jokes and not his wife. In painting himself as the clueless dad-to-be who is trying to hold onto his wallet, Forrest manages to not only have the audience laughing at him, but also sympathising with him.
In his signature style, Forrest incorporates dark but funny twists to the norm. For instance, when he reveals that he and his wife were expecting a girl, many people in the theatre “awwwww-ed” and a “mazel tov” could be heard. His retort? He was disappointed it wasn’t a boy. It’s obviously in jest and the audience is amused.
The audience is involved in the show by Forrest’s frequent interaction with those who are expecting babies (which amounted to two couples on opening night) as well as fielding questions to the audience here and there. So for a show as short as Who’s Your Daddy?, Forrest does a good job of avoiding being boxed into the special interest category by aiming to teach the audience what he has learnt instead of just throwing out a bunch of foreign or niche concepts. He also has a relevant music selection which starts with Britney Spears’s famous Oh baby, baby refrain from Baby, One More Time. It ends with him announcing that he and his wife are trying for another baby before Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On begins.
If that’s the case, we hope this sponsorship means he’ll never have to buy nappies again.