(This gets graphic and offensive, just so's you know)
Is spreading to my mind!"
- Fred Negro.
I went to see Jerry Sadowitz with a friend of mine who lives in the city centre, Keith, and the plan was for us to go to the gig and then for me to stay overnight in a spare bedroom of his. So I got on the train from Killie to Glasgow, then Glasgow to Edinburgh, arriving a few hours early to have a brief commune with the city during the festerville, as I hadn’t been there in years at that time. This was a horrible mistake, and after an hour there I just wanted to leave. I found the place utterly intolerable: noisy, smelly, obnoxious-tourist-jammed, just all-round horrible. There were pop-up eating and drinking establishments everywhere, but no pop-up toilets alongside them. This made for a disgusting piss-stained atmosphere a bit later on at night, when folk would just nip off into some dark corner and piss all over the city to their heart’s content. It was pure bliss to experience Scotland’s capital city becoming the world’s biggest open-air toilet; transcendent, you might say.So I eventually went along to Keith’s, and we got some fish and chips at a lovely wee place just past the North Bridge. The place is good, but other places during the festerville are just intolerable. Edinburgh year-round is a pathetic tacky tartan-tat-pimping tourist money-honey trap, but it really goes into arsewipe overdrive during August. The best piece of overpricing I encountered was £3.50 for a can of Diet Coke, which is basically about the tourist-fleecing measure of the place. Middle class bores and boors rampage unchecked round the streets. You can generally see when somebody is from Edinburgh – which is not very often – because they’re not as well-dressed in the middle of the holiday snap-taking peacocks, and have a slightly defeated, deflated air around them. It’s genuinely sad.
Keith’s place is not too far from the Queen’s Hall, luckily, so we didn’t have too far to swim through the multi-coloured, all-accents, molasses-thick throng. This was a good thing, because there’s only so many ugly gawking tourists stepping in front of you, or stopping abruptly in front of you to take some random snap, that you can take. You soon start to snarl foreigner-hating obscenities at the herd and just quickly learn to barge mercilessly ahead like these shameless, sleepwalking, annoying braindead cunts do.
We got ourselves into the Queen’s Hall, noting the presence of one young black guy, late teens, early twenties. We idly wondered if he was going to have to listen to Sadowitz or just stand outside on the doors if there was racist material (I would say Sadowitz is a human racist – he hates the human race all equally), or if the mixsex university-age-looking people staffing the place would be offended by the material like the whiner dolts at the Pleasance last year.
We doubted it. The students manning the place would have been warned well in advance, so there was no chance whatsoever that they could claim ignorance of the ignorant show to unfold. It was a very white crowd, mostly middle-aged, folk that probably grown up with Sadowitz in Scotland, mixed with a few curious newcomers. We went up to the first floor. I joked to a young woman on the door that I hoped this show was going to be offensive. She smiled, warning us, and everybody else going in, that taking photos or video footage was strictly verboten. Oddly, Sadowitz obsessively prowls online and removes footage of him and his performances from platforms like Youtube, which the reason why you will find practically nothing from him there. This one wee random piece of footage will give you an idea of the evening’s material anyway:
I saw that many years ago, and have been quoting it since then, because of the
witty ‘custard’ portmanteau in it. Laughing here. Fair play to the man, though,
because people filming an artist really does eat up material, killing any
surprise on a tour for people who may be going to see it later on, and are
stupid enough to ruin it for themselves by watching it beforehand.
And an artist like Sadowitz is better off not experienced in three-minute half-chewed soundbite style; he’s a caustic ill-wind-blowing human tornado of misery and anger and hilarity and cynicism and stupidity and great magic tricks (he’s regarded as one of the greatest close-up magicians in the world, apparently), and cutting his flow up really impedes it. Plus posting dodgy-quality bootlegged clips is an artist’s material making money for Youtube anyway, which is a cheeky fucking rip off, so more power to him in his search and destroy online questing.
We found our seats in the first row, and planked our middle-aged bahookies down. I looked round the place as it filled up. It looked to me like an old converted church with us sitting in the old balcony pews which, on idly glancing at the history of the place, I found out that was exactly the case. Doubt Jesus would have much liked the entertainer on display here this evening, mind you, but that hardly mattered. Cunt’s been dead long enough, he’s in no position to complain, and he was never known for his sense of humour anyway. The place looked pretty much sold out, with the odd toothgap empty seat here and there, perhaps people killed in a crash on the way to the venue, or drunkenly rolled for their wallets down some dark dodgy nearby close, or fleeing for their immor(t)al soul upon realising they would be entering a house of heretical gnashtooth blasphemy.
But, probably, the few empty seats just hadn’t sold.
Fuck knows.
Anyway, comedic conjecture aside, the black-back-curtained-and-floor stage was fairly bare, except for a table with a few to-be-revealed comedic abrayacuntyecadabra magic props. Not a huge space, but big enough for some early-19th-century ire-and-brimstone minister to pace back and forth administering oral service to the Lord, sucking off his saviour’s ego and saving salacious sinners from certain Hellish condemnation. Or from the ambiguous comedic magic realist ravings of one attempted-cancellation manic Jewish trickster. It could go either way, really, depending on your disposition and the era you were thinking about, cos it's really New American as fuck.
But meanwhile, back in the here-and-fucking-now, Jerry Sadowitz took to the sparse funereal stage space, clad in black with his trademark black top hat in place, a pallbearer at the coffin containing the corpse of Scottish comedy. The crowd roared in soon-coming cathartic-monsoon readiness, or maybe cos they were bored of waiting. His hair spilled gray and unruly out from under his funeral director headgear. Oddly, this surprised me slightly, and I realised I hadn’t seen a recent photay of him with gray hair. I’d only ever seen him with black hair in publicity photays, as far as I could recall, and it just brought home to me how long it had been since first hearing him on that mad ranting Savile-exposing album in 1987. Thirty-six years, for fucksake. Ever-ticktalking dumb unstoppable time, what a total and utter cunt it is, making suffering, stuttering, ruthlessly toothless fools of us all.
Scotland is literally not the same country it was when I first heard this eccentric, dark, hilarious magic comedian. The minute the net hit, right bang on unexpected time at the end of the 20th century, this place started changing for good, but not for the better. Sadowitz stood onstage like a dark scarecrow remnant from an outbreak past, here to tell and remind us how it all used to be, before American intersectionalist dogshit, before the tongue-ripper censorship plague that had been brought over here to make people cough and splutter and not dare to mutter anything near-gutter.
This beyond-the-pale never-stale male (cunts that use that phrase in its original form should be kicked to death on general principle) was the Last Scottish Comedian Standing, gutsy, ballsy, cunty, far beyond bowing to the mind-syphilis whims and whipping tongues of frightened mentally and emotionally ill children. And thank final epic fuck for that. Cos that was what we were here to for. To hear a man unafraid to speak, an eccentric tommygun cannonball of vicious hatefueled energy, a just plain funny cunt unafraid to do nothing more or less than spew a load of jokes like an ire hydrant, a burst sewage pipe, a disapproval-ignorer and vomiter of stupid disgusting furious truths untold for years.
Too long, too pretentious, too contentious:
Cunt was gonnae be funny, do some magic tricks and tell some jokes, then go back home to London. That was it. Or as the sighing man himself defensively put it, during one newspaper interview:
“It’s just a comedy act with magic. It’s not for everyone — and I’ve never attempted to persuade everyone to come and see it. Those that like it, come. If you won’t like it, don’t. It shouldn’t be made any heavier than that.”
That sums everything up without my rambling. But I have to say one thing: us
getting so het up and excited to see Sadowitz do his forever-schtick just
showed us how starved we had been for vulgar, coarse, shocking humour for
years. It showed how the draconian racist and sexist minority swarmtroopers had wearied
everybody to fuck with their constant bleating and weeping and girning and
clickbait toddler temper tantrums, eagerly reported by the sensation-seeking newspapers
and telly programmes (I can’t say fucking ‘legacy media,’ it’s just too stupid)
up and down the island. You just wanted to have a laugh, to make an adult
choice without having somebody else’s bratty, ratty kids screaming their
newfound Yankeepoodlepansy ideological beliefs at you.
So fucking tired of New Americans trying to dictate to grown men and women they’re not even related to what to think or say or do. I heard it first-hand in America when I was there, and I thought it was shite even then, but at least it came with sex and a bit of fun. This eternally moralising pish is totally intolerable, and they know what the fuck they can say and do forever:
And so Sadowitz, dunce-shaman, boil-lancer obscenity-dancer, opened his mouth
and let it all flow out. I don’t know what I was expecting, but not what we
got, not entirely. Having been conditioned by other, more traditional
stand-ups, I was expecting something a bit less fast-paced, more calm, taking
time for jokes and stories to kick in and wind up, especially as the man is
sixty-two years old. But…nope. The
angry, bitter, vitriolic, hilarious, sometimes-melancholy, magically-talented
mad hatter started off, a frantic whirlwinding dervish, and he never let up for
an hour. He started off by talking about how shit the last year had been for
him, on top of the cancellation from the previous year, and then went off into
hyperbole about the ever-worsening events he had supposedly undergone, calling
himself the “Titan submersible of stand-up comedy.” But he never once buckled
and was crushed, so no oxygen was wrenched from lungs, except from people
laughing, and no human parts were found freely floating and bobbing in the
billionaire-littered gory joke ocean he submerged himself and us in.
It’s interesting. Clearly Sadowitz had prepared what he was saying, after all it was an act, but it genuinely just came off as a freewheeling rant of the sort that some loony on a bus would make for your whole quaking-knees journey as you tried not to make eye contact with him. And yet it was totally stylised, a man pushing himself and his brain and tongue to the outer reaches of ability. It reminded me of George Carlin doing his ‘Modern Man’ skit (“a working rageaholic. A raging workaholic”) from his Life Is Worth Losing special. It’s an incredible piece of rap-inspired freeflowing poetry, but it was obviously memorised, as impossible as that seemed from a man of his advanced age. Which may sound a bit ageist (a cunt’s word I only use to insult it), but it’s not meant to be.
As long as somebody can stand on a stage and recite from memory, they can
perform an act, obviously. But I am sure the older a person gets the less
inclined they are to rely on something minutes-long that they would have to
recite from a-million-times-practiced memory. But the clown demon magician earthquaking
in front of us went full pelt for an hour, interspersing abject misanthropy
(never mind male-vs-female distinctions, all races and sexes and sexualities
got it scattershot without distinction) with good magic tricks, purposefully
bad magic tricks, butt-ugly slut slurs, bitter virulent cynicism, intelligent-brain
despair, world-weary melancholy and juvenile, spiteful hatred.
Plus probably some other negative emotions and stuff and nonsense I missed out.
The man barely paused to acknowledge laughs from the crowd. He tore into everybody and everything interminably, and recalling a lot of the material in the fast-food-server rapid-fire order it came was an incredible feat to watch. It did come off like just a random rambling rant upon occasion, mainly when you had to really focus to keep up with the sometimes-slightly-muffled acoustics in the place. Keith is a filmmaker, and was not impressed with the sound at all, saying it should have been easy to mike up a place that was not particularly big. Most of the jokes landed. A baffling few did not.
Sometimes Sadowitz would be a couple of jokes down before you even got the joke in front of your brain. The vitriol with which he ripped the middle class fartsplash journos from The Guardian and other spreadshits was amazing to hear, because what half-intelligent person doesn’t despise these agenda-pimping rags? As a piece of sculpted stand-up art, it was an incredible feat. And, contrary to how it was billed, it did have some new material, and included some ultimate naysayer jokes, i.e. about Lucy Letby, whose vile, heartbreaking case was relatively fresh at the time. Laughs at those joke grenades were guilty, but still there.
The man is lucky in that he somehow seems to have what the Americans call “fuck you money,” which means if a person earns enough, or is worth enough, they can get along in their life without doing a job they hate, or having to put up with having to tone down their vision if they’re an artist. If Sadowitz had to do that now, and rely on it for a living, he’d starve to death, as self-censoring, once-funny comedians like Jim Jefferies and Frankie Boyle and Bill Burr (his horrendous new film Old Dads – oh my fucking god!) found out. I dunno how the fuck the comedian-tragedian manic magic man manages to support himself, except for recycling banned shows, but more power to him for it. Fuck, somebody has to fucking poke Free Speech airholes for the rest of us to continue to breathe without vomiting on the stench of lavender-scented Edinburgh yooni-farts and their sniffy prissy censor-bully bullshit.
You know, it’s sometimes almost easy to forget that when an artist is onstage performing, they’re doing just that – performing. They have a prepared act, they are professionals. They’re not just some idiot who wandered in off the street to scream some non-sequiturs and obscenities before fucking off back into the night with their ill-gotten gains in hand, glittering sociopathic eyes glinting in dark-pupil-illuminating glee at the crazed mischief they have gotten away with. Watching Jerry Sadowitz is definitely having to remember that.
What we got willingly subjected to was a deranged nihilistic performer who not only pushes the envelope, he tears it up, pisses on it, and throws the soaking splatty stationery fragments back into the laughing audience’s face. He’s been doing this for forty years, he’s an artist, he’s not just some Johnny-scum-lately bloodshit-drizzling clownfeast. He has honed this caustic holocaust of life-trauma no-prisoners-taken death-play since long before any of his youthful detractors were born. He will continue to do so until long after some of the wee jobby guzzlers and capelifters repent of their inexperienced, youthful, artist-attacking ways. Pegging him as just some controversy loudmouth does a severe disservice to the man, and it’s great that the New American Lilliputians cowering and gibbering and jabbering round his feet never managed to bring him down, “potential hate crime” warning pish or not. As he correctly put it:
“There are no lines to be drawn in stand-up, if stand-up’s an art form. No lines.”
I don’t recall many, if any, comedians standing up for Sadowitz last year when
his show got cancelled, though I might be wrong. I wouldn’t be surprised if
that wasn’t partly because other comedians hate his freedom, because his
Hellspawned truth-telling act shows them up for the sell-outs they truly are –
and they know it. Once an artist gets to a certain level of career achievement,
they have to keep their material as blandly mainstream as they can get it, and
this, of course, makes them pretty easy to censor and tone down. When you’ve got an expensive mansion to pay for, and private school lessons for
the kids, and botox and boobjobs for the missus and mistress, you have to shut
your mouth and watch what you say and think and do.
That disabled lesbian bird, whatsername – oh aye, Rosie Jones – she’s quite funny, though she gets away with stuff others wouldn’t because of her sexual orientation and her tragic and horrible cerebral palsy. The middle class broadshits would have you believe this is the ‘new Female Doctor Feelgood’ therapy session ‘comedy’, but really it’s just like the rest of the fucking arts on this isolated island now – middle class and tedious and decorticated and laugh-starved as fuck. The female supremacist, sorry, feminist sense of humour is no laughing matter, after all, and neither is that of many Americans – they take everything literally, and don’t do irony or sarcasm. So when you import an ideology based in large part on these two handicaps...yer up Shite Burn without a propulsion method. Gay, black, female...whatever. Who else is funny? Off the top of my head: Sarah Millican. Josh Johnson. Larry Dean. Joe Lycett. Gary Coleman. Cruella Braverman. E.T. Ironic that the evil Tory nutter doesn't like aliens, cos she certainly looks like a very famous Spielberg one:
You know, isn’t this boring as fuck? All this stuff has been so well-chewed-over over the last few years by the New Americans and the gullible complicit clickbait media and the wackademics and the fence-sitters and the produce-shitters and the discontent-creators that it’s not even really worth losing sleep over, or worth talking about again. I am only writing this because the state of the arts (I avoid all arts scenes on principle) and Free Speech in this country are becoming boringly draconian, wankfilled and ever-more-unlubed-drycunt.
You’re not getting fucked silly with laughter by any of these zero-life problems, closeted-wannabe-reprobate tongue-cutters, you’re being made to kowtow to New American arseholery and madness and Ivy League religion. It’s more than I can stand, personally. They can go and lick their own genitals in public like they always do, like the talent-barren beauty-blind dogs they are, in both the arts and politics. Cos this country is a fucking busted flush from lonely unsaved John O’ Groats to the silent-screaming deaf and Dumfries and Galloway. And the modern world is a nightmare in Hell for anybody with half a brain or heart left, too.
Keith and I laughed like fuck all during the performance. I idly scanned the also-laughing crowd occasionally, almost half-hoping for some halfwit cancellation-screaming action, so I could go off on them. No such luck. Sadowitz riffed on stuff like the reality of sick Scottish comedians, “fat ugly lesbian” SNP councillors, trans people, being cancelled, any amount of bear-baiting hateful-speech shit. Didn’t punch much down at white working class males, as far as I recall, which I did appreciate.
(I included a segment here about Sadowitz's caustic entry for the Edinburgh Fringe joke of the year, but he asked me to remove any material of his when I emailed him this article. Totally fair enough.)
I went to see Jerry Sadowitz with a friend of mine who lives in the city centre, Keith, and the plan was for us to go to the gig and then for me to stay overnight in a spare bedroom of his. So I got on the train from Killie to Glasgow, then Glasgow to Edinburgh, arriving a few hours early to have a brief commune with the city during the festerville, as I hadn’t been there in years at that time. This was a horrible mistake, and after an hour there I just wanted to leave. I found the place utterly intolerable: noisy, smelly, obnoxious-tourist-jammed, just all-round horrible. There were pop-up eating and drinking establishments everywhere, but no pop-up toilets alongside them. This made for a disgusting piss-stained atmosphere a bit later on at night, when folk would just nip off into some dark corner and piss all over the city to their heart’s content. It was pure bliss to experience Scotland’s capital city becoming the world’s biggest open-air toilet; transcendent, you might say.So I eventually went along to Keith’s, and we got some fish and chips at a lovely wee place just past the North Bridge. The place is good, but other places during the festerville are just intolerable. Edinburgh year-round is a pathetic tacky tartan-tat-pimping tourist money-honey trap, but it really goes into arsewipe overdrive during August. The best piece of overpricing I encountered was £3.50 for a can of Diet Coke, which is basically about the tourist-fleecing measure of the place. Middle class bores and boors rampage unchecked round the streets. You can generally see when somebody is from Edinburgh – which is not very often – because they’re not as well-dressed in the middle of the holiday snap-taking peacocks, and have a slightly defeated, deflated air around them. It’s genuinely sad.
Keith’s place is not too far from the Queen’s Hall, luckily, so we didn’t have too far to swim through the multi-coloured, all-accents, molasses-thick throng. This was a good thing, because there’s only so many ugly gawking tourists stepping in front of you, or stopping abruptly in front of you to take some random snap, that you can take. You soon start to snarl foreigner-hating obscenities at the herd and just quickly learn to barge mercilessly ahead like these shameless, sleepwalking, annoying braindead cunts do.
We got ourselves into the Queen’s Hall, noting the presence of one young black guy, late teens, early twenties. We idly wondered if he was going to have to listen to Sadowitz or just stand outside on the doors if there was racist material (I would say Sadowitz is a human racist – he hates the human race all equally), or if the mixsex university-age-looking people staffing the place would be offended by the material like the whiner dolts at the Pleasance last year.
We doubted it. The students manning the place would have been warned well in advance, so there was no chance whatsoever that they could claim ignorance of the ignorant show to unfold. It was a very white crowd, mostly middle-aged, folk that probably grown up with Sadowitz in Scotland, mixed with a few curious newcomers. We went up to the first floor. I joked to a young woman on the door that I hoped this show was going to be offensive. She smiled, warning us, and everybody else going in, that taking photos or video footage was strictly verboten. Oddly, Sadowitz obsessively prowls online and removes footage of him and his performances from platforms like Youtube, which the reason why you will find practically nothing from him there. This one wee random piece of footage will give you an idea of the evening’s material anyway:
And an artist like Sadowitz is better off not experienced in three-minute half-chewed soundbite style; he’s a caustic ill-wind-blowing human tornado of misery and anger and hilarity and cynicism and stupidity and great magic tricks (he’s regarded as one of the greatest close-up magicians in the world, apparently), and cutting his flow up really impedes it. Plus posting dodgy-quality bootlegged clips is an artist’s material making money for Youtube anyway, which is a cheeky fucking rip off, so more power to him in his search and destroy online questing.
We found our seats in the first row, and planked our middle-aged bahookies down. I looked round the place as it filled up. It looked to me like an old converted church with us sitting in the old balcony pews which, on idly glancing at the history of the place, I found out that was exactly the case. Doubt Jesus would have much liked the entertainer on display here this evening, mind you, but that hardly mattered. Cunt’s been dead long enough, he’s in no position to complain, and he was never known for his sense of humour anyway. The place looked pretty much sold out, with the odd toothgap empty seat here and there, perhaps people killed in a crash on the way to the venue, or drunkenly rolled for their wallets down some dark dodgy nearby close, or fleeing for their immor(t)al soul upon realising they would be entering a house of heretical gnashtooth blasphemy.
But, probably, the few empty seats just hadn’t sold.
Fuck knows.
Anyway, comedic conjecture aside, the black-back-curtained-and-floor stage was fairly bare, except for a table with a few to-be-revealed comedic abrayacuntyecadabra magic props. Not a huge space, but big enough for some early-19th-century ire-and-brimstone minister to pace back and forth administering oral service to the Lord, sucking off his saviour’s ego and saving salacious sinners from certain Hellish condemnation. Or from the ambiguous comedic magic realist ravings of one attempted-cancellation manic Jewish trickster. It could go either way, really, depending on your disposition and the era you were thinking about, cos it's really New American as fuck.
But meanwhile, back in the here-and-fucking-now, Jerry Sadowitz took to the sparse funereal stage space, clad in black with his trademark black top hat in place, a pallbearer at the coffin containing the corpse of Scottish comedy. The crowd roared in soon-coming cathartic-monsoon readiness, or maybe cos they were bored of waiting. His hair spilled gray and unruly out from under his funeral director headgear. Oddly, this surprised me slightly, and I realised I hadn’t seen a recent photay of him with gray hair. I’d only ever seen him with black hair in publicity photays, as far as I could recall, and it just brought home to me how long it had been since first hearing him on that mad ranting Savile-exposing album in 1987. Thirty-six years, for fucksake. Ever-ticktalking dumb unstoppable time, what a total and utter cunt it is, making suffering, stuttering, ruthlessly toothless fools of us all.
Scotland is literally not the same country it was when I first heard this eccentric, dark, hilarious magic comedian. The minute the net hit, right bang on unexpected time at the end of the 20th century, this place started changing for good, but not for the better. Sadowitz stood onstage like a dark scarecrow remnant from an outbreak past, here to tell and remind us how it all used to be, before American intersectionalist dogshit, before the tongue-ripper censorship plague that had been brought over here to make people cough and splutter and not dare to mutter anything near-gutter.
This beyond-the-pale never-stale male (cunts that use that phrase in its original form should be kicked to death on general principle) was the Last Scottish Comedian Standing, gutsy, ballsy, cunty, far beyond bowing to the mind-syphilis whims and whipping tongues of frightened mentally and emotionally ill children. And thank final epic fuck for that. Cos that was what we were here to for. To hear a man unafraid to speak, an eccentric tommygun cannonball of vicious hatefueled energy, a just plain funny cunt unafraid to do nothing more or less than spew a load of jokes like an ire hydrant, a burst sewage pipe, a disapproval-ignorer and vomiter of stupid disgusting furious truths untold for years.
Too long, too pretentious, too contentious:
Cunt was gonnae be funny, do some magic tricks and tell some jokes, then go back home to London. That was it. Or as the sighing man himself defensively put it, during one newspaper interview:
“It’s just a comedy act with magic. It’s not for everyone — and I’ve never attempted to persuade everyone to come and see it. Those that like it, come. If you won’t like it, don’t. It shouldn’t be made any heavier than that.”
So fucking tired of New Americans trying to dictate to grown men and women they’re not even related to what to think or say or do. I heard it first-hand in America when I was there, and I thought it was shite even then, but at least it came with sex and a bit of fun. This eternally moralising pish is totally intolerable, and they know what the fuck they can say and do forever:
It’s interesting. Clearly Sadowitz had prepared what he was saying, after all it was an act, but it genuinely just came off as a freewheeling rant of the sort that some loony on a bus would make for your whole quaking-knees journey as you tried not to make eye contact with him. And yet it was totally stylised, a man pushing himself and his brain and tongue to the outer reaches of ability. It reminded me of George Carlin doing his ‘Modern Man’ skit (“a working rageaholic. A raging workaholic”) from his Life Is Worth Losing special. It’s an incredible piece of rap-inspired freeflowing poetry, but it was obviously memorised, as impossible as that seemed from a man of his advanced age. Which may sound a bit ageist (a cunt’s word I only use to insult it), but it’s not meant to be.
Plus probably some other negative emotions and stuff and nonsense I missed out.
The man barely paused to acknowledge laughs from the crowd. He tore into everybody and everything interminably, and recalling a lot of the material in the fast-food-server rapid-fire order it came was an incredible feat to watch. It did come off like just a random rambling rant upon occasion, mainly when you had to really focus to keep up with the sometimes-slightly-muffled acoustics in the place. Keith is a filmmaker, and was not impressed with the sound at all, saying it should have been easy to mike up a place that was not particularly big. Most of the jokes landed. A baffling few did not.
Sometimes Sadowitz would be a couple of jokes down before you even got the joke in front of your brain. The vitriol with which he ripped the middle class fartsplash journos from The Guardian and other spreadshits was amazing to hear, because what half-intelligent person doesn’t despise these agenda-pimping rags? As a piece of sculpted stand-up art, it was an incredible feat. And, contrary to how it was billed, it did have some new material, and included some ultimate naysayer jokes, i.e. about Lucy Letby, whose vile, heartbreaking case was relatively fresh at the time. Laughs at those joke grenades were guilty, but still there.
The man is lucky in that he somehow seems to have what the Americans call “fuck you money,” which means if a person earns enough, or is worth enough, they can get along in their life without doing a job they hate, or having to put up with having to tone down their vision if they’re an artist. If Sadowitz had to do that now, and rely on it for a living, he’d starve to death, as self-censoring, once-funny comedians like Jim Jefferies and Frankie Boyle and Bill Burr (his horrendous new film Old Dads – oh my fucking god!) found out. I dunno how the fuck the comedian-tragedian manic magic man manages to support himself, except for recycling banned shows, but more power to him for it. Fuck, somebody has to fucking poke Free Speech airholes for the rest of us to continue to breathe without vomiting on the stench of lavender-scented Edinburgh yooni-farts and their sniffy prissy censor-bully bullshit.
You know, it’s sometimes almost easy to forget that when an artist is onstage performing, they’re doing just that – performing. They have a prepared act, they are professionals. They’re not just some idiot who wandered in off the street to scream some non-sequiturs and obscenities before fucking off back into the night with their ill-gotten gains in hand, glittering sociopathic eyes glinting in dark-pupil-illuminating glee at the crazed mischief they have gotten away with. Watching Jerry Sadowitz is definitely having to remember that.
What we got willingly subjected to was a deranged nihilistic performer who not only pushes the envelope, he tears it up, pisses on it, and throws the soaking splatty stationery fragments back into the laughing audience’s face. He’s been doing this for forty years, he’s an artist, he’s not just some Johnny-scum-lately bloodshit-drizzling clownfeast. He has honed this caustic holocaust of life-trauma no-prisoners-taken death-play since long before any of his youthful detractors were born. He will continue to do so until long after some of the wee jobby guzzlers and capelifters repent of their inexperienced, youthful, artist-attacking ways. Pegging him as just some controversy loudmouth does a severe disservice to the man, and it’s great that the New American Lilliputians cowering and gibbering and jabbering round his feet never managed to bring him down, “potential hate crime” warning pish or not. As he correctly put it:
“There are no lines to be drawn in stand-up, if stand-up’s an art form. No lines.”
The older, forked-tongue
stand-ups who have now castrated themselves, prostrating themselves on the
altar of cash-grab security, are lucky now they came up when they did. They still have a bit of ‘edgy’ cred to their reps. If the young ‘comedians’
coming up now (often middle class, gay, female, disabled, coloured, or
whatever- the damaged Australian lung-exerciser Hannah 'Grating Manhater' Gadsby symbolises this
type all too well) are often deeply moralistic and deeply unfunny. It’s not
because of their age or sex or physical shape or sexuality they’re pish, it’s
just cos, well, they’re making art by ideology-approved committee, and that’s a
cunt’s trick all round. Of course
everybody deserves a chance at doing comedy – or indeed any other artform. They
just have to be funny, no matter what their shape, or size, or skin colour, or
sex, or sexuality.
That disabled lesbian bird, whatsername – oh aye, Rosie Jones – she’s quite funny, though she gets away with stuff others wouldn’t because of her sexual orientation and her tragic and horrible cerebral palsy. The middle class broadshits would have you believe this is the ‘new Female Doctor Feelgood’ therapy session ‘comedy’, but really it’s just like the rest of the fucking arts on this isolated island now – middle class and tedious and decorticated and laugh-starved as fuck. The female supremacist, sorry, feminist sense of humour is no laughing matter, after all, and neither is that of many Americans – they take everything literally, and don’t do irony or sarcasm. So when you import an ideology based in large part on these two handicaps...yer up Shite Burn without a propulsion method. Gay, black, female...whatever. Who else is funny? Off the top of my head: Sarah Millican. Josh Johnson. Larry Dean. Joe Lycett. Gary Coleman. Cruella Braverman. E.T. Ironic that the evil Tory nutter doesn't like aliens, cos she certainly looks like a very famous Spielberg one:
You’re not getting fucked silly with laughter by any of these zero-life problems, closeted-wannabe-reprobate tongue-cutters, you’re being made to kowtow to New American arseholery and madness and Ivy League religion. It’s more than I can stand, personally. They can go and lick their own genitals in public like they always do, like the talent-barren beauty-blind dogs they are, in both the arts and politics. Cos this country is a fucking busted flush from lonely unsaved John O’ Groats to the silent-screaming deaf and Dumfries and Galloway. And the modern world is a nightmare in Hell for anybody with half a brain or heart left, too.
Keith and I laughed like fuck all during the performance. I idly scanned the also-laughing crowd occasionally, almost half-hoping for some halfwit cancellation-screaming action, so I could go off on them. No such luck. Sadowitz riffed on stuff like the reality of sick Scottish comedians, “fat ugly lesbian” SNP councillors, trans people, being cancelled, any amount of bear-baiting hateful-speech shit. Didn’t punch much down at white working class males, as far as I recall, which I did appreciate.
(I included a segment here about Sadowitz's caustic entry for the Edinburgh Fringe joke of the year, but he asked me to remove any material of his when I emailed him this article. Totally fair enough.)
And then it was over, and the magician pif-paf-poof-disappeared from the stage after
spitting, pissing, shitting and puking venom over us all for a powerful liberating hour.
Keith and I both agreed we loved it, and we were glad we had seen it. As we
left, I went up to the young woman at the door and complained that I had never
been so not-offended in my life that I wanted to register a complaint that it
wasn’t offensive enough. She laughed and we made our way downstairs, past the
bar, which had ‘accessible toilets’ (aren’t all fucking toilets ‘accessible’?
What would inaccessible bogs be? Ones with the door locked so folk pissed
themselves outside them?) and (shaking my head here) ‘gendered toilets’.
There’s nothing you can even say to that. Then we were out into the balmy
Edinburgh arsehole-tourist-stuffed evening again and the never-acted-on threats
of violence flowed like angry expletive-bodied fine wine from our lips, as we
compared sick cracks and the evening’s fun comedic activities. It was a great fucking night all round.
There's a third part to this story. It links from the home page:
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