Scott Capurro
****
KATE COPSTICK
THE STAND (VENUE 5)
WELL, now I have seen everything. After this show I watched Scott Capurro – the man who makes sulphuric acid look like Oil of Olay – stand upstairs in The Stand, shaking hands with his entire audience of mainly middle-aged, upper middle class, Scottish-conservative, straight folk while they told him how much they had enjoyed it and how clever he was. I just joined in on the end of the line behind the elderly gentleman who had never heard of Capurro, but had seen him having Lunch With The Hamiltons and been impressed with his quick wit.
The elderly gentleman had been rather less impressed with Capurro’s “obsession with all the gay stuff” in his own show but was still a fan of the intelligence, the quickfire wit and the (his word) charm behind the heat-seeking barbs about Jews, children, chavs, dwarfs, transsexuals, the Chinese, Christopher Reeve, Oprah and having sex with a man with no hands.
Capurro still rushes in where most straight comedians would be terrified to tread and his act is played out to a backing track of gasping, ohhh-ing and oooing and the sound of bums shifting uneasily in seats, but this year, playing – as he points out – to 28 people in a toilet (it is not, he is upstairs in Stand II, which it is not exactly the EICC, but rather a nice room, although I appreciate it is a whole new, tiny world for a man whom I last saw plying Pleasance 1), there is real warmth in his warm-up, real sadness in his finish and in between, no-one was mentally scarred for life by his merciless pillory. The couple in the front row may take a little while to get their relationship back on an even keel after Capurro’s attentions, but they never stopped laughing.
As usual, much of the show is taken up cruising Capurro’s sex life for rough trade. And some of it is pretty rough. But now the swizzle-stick thin American has opened up the act a little. There is some nice political stuff, a whole bunch of great one-liners and a surprisingly good impression of a big, butch, black porn star. And there is personal stuff. This is quite a different Scott Capurro. He’s never going to wear his heart on his sleeve, but we finally get to see here that he has one.
• Until 27 August. Today 9.30pm