Not many acts enter fringe legend with their first stab at standup – so you can forgive Adrienne Truscott’s worries about how to follow that up. The US cabaret artist’s 2013 set Asking for It, addressing the culture of rape jokes in comedy, scored a deserved global hit. Her new one asks, in its title no less, whether Truscott might be a One Trick Pony. It’s a risk: if you make performance anxiety your theme, you’d better be good quickly, or the audience will start siding with your self-doubt. Tonight’s performance falls foul of that.
The problems are partly technical – forgivably, on day one. There’s an awkward hiatus at the start, from which point Truscott both forgets material and openly frets about whether she’ll finish on time. It feels chaotic and – combined with all her talk of being a comedy amateur – undermines the confidence and flow.
Asking for It might have survived such shakiness. It made a virtue of Truscott’s outsider status, and had a propulsive raison d’etre. One Trick Pony has less sense of purpose, and makes Truscott’s lack of conventional comedy technique more conspicuous. She tells some great stories – one about stealing children’s pancakes in a diner “like some weird Texas Goldilocks”; one about male standups boasting about their use of prostitutes – which don’t reach comic climaxes, obliging Truscott to tell us when they’re done.
Elsewhere, there’s much in the vein of her previous show (animated wigs quoting her internet trolls; a last flash of her “pussy” before she covers up for good), and some funny Andy Kaufman footage. There’s also a pro-abortion routine arguing for its extension into the postnatal period. With such sparky, transgressive material, Truscott is in her element. But she’s there too seldom; her show will have far better nights than this.
- At the Gilded Balloon until 17 August. Box office: 0131-622 6552.
