A thinly attended (he had apparently reservations for the whole place but without taking money, so only half the people turned up) warmup show from the patriarch of scabrous comedy, the progenitor of Frankie Boyle, Jimmy Carr and a heap of other hugely more famous close-to-the-knuckle comedians. An antihero of the alternative comedy scene – and also a world-renowned closeup magician – who made his name skewering the sacred politically correct cows of the 80s to audiences of right-on lefties. Sadowitz flirted with telly, flirted with some degree of success, but has in the end stayed true to his self-image as a chronically inadequate and underachieving figure, a better place from where to launch his rancid, bitter broadsides at literally all and sundry.
I had dimly wondered whether, in this so-called ‘woke’ era, at a time when fascism and the far right are on the march, when laughing at unfortunates has stopped being ironic and returned to a move of the powerful, Sadowitz’s comedy would still be funny or whether our new awareness of the victims of abuse – and perhaps of our increasingly perilious reality – would make the always unpalatable into the utterly unacceptable.
I suppose it is difficult to say, but from my perspective, Sadowitz, as energetic at nearly 60 as I can remember him, rolled back the years to when it was indeed acceptable to make jokes about pretty much every group in the world, from the most deserving to the least. Despite the fact that some of it could have found itself in the worst Richard Littlejohn columns (in fact, there was a riff on how Boris Johnson had stolen his line about Muslim women looking like letterboxes), somehow – and this was probably the most extraordinary magic trick that he performed – it (mostly) was, while despicable, extremely, outrageously funny.
I think it must be something to do with his unlikely charm, and perhaps the way that he performs it all from a place of extreme vulnerability, so none of it comes over as punching down. (Sadowitz himself claimed to have no truck with that distinction, saying that punching down is as acceptable as everything else; and there were bits that just didn’t land, although it was hard to tell whether he had overstepped a line or just not finessed the humour enough.) While he still looks like a Victorian scarecrow that has been Frankensteined into an imitation of life, he remains an extraordinary performer just to watch and I would have happily snapped photos throughout if I hadn’t thought he might smash my camera and boot me out.
Obviously I was bringing my privilege, as we say nowadays, but it was a refreshing experience to chuck all that neurosis out of the window and just watch someone unilaterally smearing the entire human race with bile. He made it, in his own words, a safe space for bigotry, but somehow the bigotry, being both universal and unconnected to any power, was joyous instead of vile.
It might be also the way that he point blank refused to admit the especial awfulness of our era, which while maybe nonsense, was at least a relief from the unrelenting rainfall of bad news. I guess your mileage may vary.
Outside, one of the few punters noted: “It’s not for everyone.”
In actual fact, it's not for anyone.
