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Comic Dave Burd plays a fictionalised version of himself in this cringe-heavy series about a privileged rapper with zero self-awareness and a fixation with his crotch
I know our mental bandwidth is currently taken up with managing life under pandemic conditions without the help of anyone who seems to know what they’re doing, so let us lay out the conceit of BBC Two’s new US import Dave as clearly as possibly.
Dave is a comedy about Dave, a neurotic white Jewish rapper who goes by the name Lil Dicky (the show’s creator and star is, as it happens, the white Jewish comedian Dave Burd, who raps under the name Lil Dicky). Real Dave became a YouTube sensation in 2013 when one of his songs went viral. He has parlayed this into a legitimate sitcom for the US cable channel FXX which has now reached our shores. Similarly, fictional Dave becomes a YouTube sensation when one of his songs goes viral, and he tries to parlay his success into a legitimate rap career. A lot of Dave (the series) is about Dave’s (the character) penis. The first episode’s opening scene is set in a doctor’s office. There, Dave is explaining during an STI check up that he was born with “a tangled urethra” and the operations performed used his scrotum skin (“You know how it’s like chicken skin?”) to repair the shaft (“So my theory is that my dick is made of balls”) and left much scarring. It is a situation we return to a lot. Continue reading...