Strictly for strong stomachs
By Bruce Dessau, Evening Standard 02.02.07
Taboo-busting: Scott Capurro does not care who he offends
Not for the narrow minded
Critic’s choice: Top five comedy shows
You wait ages for a comedian to discuss having sex with Jesus, then two come along in the same week.
After Richard Herring’s playful mock-blasphemy in Battersea, Scott Capurro’s sacrilege in Soho is much more warped.
His assertion that Christ was surely gay because he wore sandals is one of the more kittenish remarks in a viciously catty set-piece.
The skinny American played a fey make-up artist in Mrs Doubtfire, but there is no cosy campery here.
Capurro is an equal-opportunities taboo-buster, mercilessly attacking everyone from heterosexuals to Jews to the Dutch. Even Prince Philip would squirm at his snide asides about the Chinese.
Dig deeper, however, and the real target is Capurro himself. At 44 – “80 in gay years” – he wonders why he is alive when so many friends are dead.
His tense re-enactment of a phone call to get his latest HIV test results is a powerful peak in a show which, when it connects, is both deliciously funny and disturbingly honest.
This is as confrontational as comedy gets. One routine, replaying the imagined aggressive bedroom behaviour of black men, even had this heard-it-all hack feeling queasy. Strictly for strong stomachs.
Note from me: I’d print the other reviews here, from The Times or The Independent, but all my reviews sounded similar. 3 stars, 3 stars, 3 stars. I’m used to performing in tiny rooms with a half filled house to raves. At the Soho Theatre, I was performing to a larger, mostly sold out room, and nobody walked out. Maybe the critics like me contained. I know they’re threatened by a confident, remotely attractive gay man who has sex and speaks graphically about it. And what kind of rating do i expect, when i say that Jesus is AIDS? I prefer sold out rooms to the alternative, but i suppose i’ve always taken consolation in the fact that, no matter how aggressive audiences have become, at least the press support what I do. I guess I have nothing to bitch about, I’m being reviewed. But why bother, when the show changed dramatically every night? I feel let down by the people I thought were smart. Like my friends, or at least aquaintences, are turning away from my work.
Maybe this is what it feels like to finally become successful. I’ll call Graham and ask him.
xx