E4
Udderbelly / George Square Theatre, Edinburgh
August, 2006
**** / *
This year's Fringe scandal, such as it
is, has been based on a rather factitious and uncomprehending newspaper
article alleging on the basis of two remarks that anti-Semitism is once
again broadly socially acceptable. One of the supposed offenders is
Reginald D Hunter, a gentle giant from Atlanta, Georgia who is as
thoughtful a comedian as you will ever see. Hunter raps with his
audience in the pre-hip-hop sense of telling it like it is, and uses
humour to enliven the path towards understanding. The night I saw him,
the anti-Semitism story had just broken, and he spent the first fifteen
minutes of his set explaining that his constant themes are freedom and
awareness. I was sitting next to a reviewer from the Jewish Chronicle, who showed no
problems at all with this material, for Hunter makes it clear that he
regularly interrogates himself about such prejudices. His rich, smooth
voice is the sweet coating on his blend of profundity and amusement.
Doug Stanhope is also all about freedom, but in his case it is the
freedom to do only what he approves of, otherwise you will get bellowed
at endlessly, stridently and tediously. Stanhope's ostensible values
are liberal, but they are more than fully negated by his style. He,
too, does 20-odd minutes about "the Jews", but every time he protests
his innocence he stokes the fires still further (an awkward metaphor
that Stanhope would relish and over-develop).
In a moment of breathtaking cheek, he imagines Bill Hicks living on and
selling out to commercialism; Stanhope makes noises like Hicks, but is
entirely devoid of the challenging element to his material. He seems to
imagine that people find him unfunny because he is offensive, and that
those who are offended by him are by definition vermin. In fact it is
perfectly possible to be both offensive and hilarious, it's just that
Stanhope doesn't manage it. He might also like to consider the
possibility that if that many people are offended (and the remainder
simply howl like drunken rednecks), then it might not be that he is the
one who is right and the rest of the world wrong. Just a thought.