Remarkably-named American comic Moses Storm grew up in a literal doomsday cult. Unfortunately (or not) it was a spectacularly unsuccessful doomsday cult, one of those malevolent offshoots of Christianity that operate by being horrible to people, a tactic that meant it never actually grew beyond three families. To somewhat counteract this chronic lack of appeal, the cult’s adults had lots of children – as Storm puts it in one of show’s more head-spinning moments, he essentially owes his very existence to the cult’s breeding programme.
It’s a remarkable story, but Storm has wedded it to a peculiar conceit: the audience is made to don lab coats and encouraged to come up with its own jokey ideas for a cult.
It feels like a bit of an exercise in lede-burying: come and make up a cult! Oh by the way I was raised in an actual cult, maybe I should say a little about that!
As Storm himself admits at an emotional point near the end, he’s still very much processing all of this and thus struggles to pull a really killer conclusion out of the bag. The interactive business feels like a wilful distraction that largely exists to give his set an ending.
To be clear, it’s often very funny. A slideshow of the pornographic cartoons he drew as a teen while having little grasp of actual female anatomy is an absolute scream, and he’s a fine and funny raconteur. I also suspect he is personally getting quite a lot out of talking about this. But he never quite gets to grips with why he is talking about it, and it”s hard to shake the feeling that it’s a lot more gimmicky than it needed to be.