Digital Review
Ian Stuart: Day Drinker
3 stars (out of 5)
Ian Stuart’s party guy persona boasted on Day Drinker may be an act, but he’s definitely researched the role. This account of modern life will ring with college age males like the resonate sound of a playful, near hemorrhage-inducing ear slap. Cycling through various irresponsible positions on drugs and alcohol this renegade stoner wishfully hopes a police officer will assume his tiny drug baggies are for “really small sandwiches…made out of powder donuts.” Hopefully the comedy thing works out for him because this unraveling confession of an album makes him impossible to hire. He takes some time apart from the set to talk science, mentioning the new clinical successes of ecstasy, going on to say it would be a unanimous favorite for treating P.T.S.D if glow sticks didn’t compromise camouflage so severely. He asks the audience to help refresh his memory of what his new hobby is called. “The New Age Oriental thing with needles” was not acupuncture, as he prodded the audience into suggesting, but heroin.
Although all his jokes are relevant to the lifestyle of a debauchery prone young male, he thoroughly combs the demographic. Some of these jokes fall short, leaving the audience at the taping to howl at the grotesqueness of the joke to avoid letting silence fall. His idea to name a strand of weed “Afghan Divorce Court” seemed funny, but to explain further that you get stoned like an unfaithful Middle Eastern woman fell cruelly short with the crowd. And though the punch line of “Designated Drunk Chick” is quite hilarious, Stuart relies too heavily on a few seconds to out power a long winded set up. Still, this testimony as to the peculiar specifics of male living in the millennium era, like watching scrambled porn as an adolescent to find out in a divine moment of TV picture clarity that he had in fact been indulging on a pay per view wrestling fight, brings forth a charming, realistic realm of thought: “Darkly charming stoner comedy,” as his web-bio states.
Day Drinker, his first comedy album released for digital sale, is available at IhateIanStuart.com for $2, and very well may be worth the listen.
