Not every show finds its critic. Excel Comedy & Mathem-antics is built for spreadsheet devotees – specifically, PC-based Excel devotees – which means it arrives at Adelaide Fringe with a narrower target than its marketing suggests.
Spreadsheet hacks and humour covers a broad church; what David Benaim delivers is something more particular, more niche, and, for the right audience, more rewarding than any generalised tech comedy has any right to be.
Situated near Sonia. She was in my row at the Balcony Bar on 10 March, and she laughed – outrageously, hysterically – at every syllable Benaim uttered, prompting him to invite her back for every remaining performance.
She is, in miniature, the ideal audience member this show imagines: someone for whom the collision of Excel formulas and stand-up punchlines produces a specific, almost pharmaceutical joy. For the rest of us, the mileage varies – and sit where you can see the screen.
What Benaim has done structurally is more interesting than the premise implies. Comedy and instruction do not alternate here – they fuse: he wrote the script not in Word but in Excel, and he shows you the spreadsheet. He maps the show’s emotional arc on a graph, live, so the audience can see not only where they are but how much funny remains.
The show’s deepest ambition, though, is not comedic – it is thematic. Three strands run through the hour: Excel, mathematics, and a third subject Benaim has chosen to keep out of his publicity materials. What unifies them is the outsider: a man set apart by his subject matter, his geography – Gibraltar-born, Cambodia-based – and a personal strand handled with quiet courage.
The pivot point is Alan Turing. Benaim asks the room what Turing is best known for; the AI-literate instinct reaches for the Turing Test, but Benaim is talking about Enigma – the cracking of a code that saved, by Churchill’s own reckoning, more than eleven million lives.
Benaim holds Turing up as a personal hero, a man to whom he has written a letter across time. What the British government did to Turing after the war – the prosecution, the chemical castration, the death – Benaim places before the audience as an open question: are a hero’s contributions worthless simply because of who he was? The laughs have stopped by this point.
Excel Comedy & Mathem-antics is a show that knows exactly what it is – and then, in its final movement, reveals it is something more. The comedy works best for its intended audience; the emotional payload lands for everyone. Come for the formulas. Stay for the reckoning.
Excel Comedy & Mathem-antics
The Balcony Bar – The Austral Hotel, 205 Rundle Street, Adelaide
Performance: Tuesday 10 March 2026
Season continues to 22 March 2026
Information and Bookings: www.adelaidefringe.com.au
Image: David Benaim stars in Excel comedy & Mathem-antics (supplied)
Review: Daniel G. Taylor