What's so funny?
Kristine Levine is being brought to us by the same producer who imported Doug Stanhope, Hans Teeuwen, Maria Bamford and other fine comics to Edinburgh.
What's her story?
She's a 40-year-old mother of three "fat" kids by three fathers, who worked for 13 years as a clerk in a porn store in Portland, Oregon. Her show is called, er, Fat Whore.
Enchanté.
You won't be. Levine's autobiographical set largely comprises outrageous tales from "adult" retail, plus a few anecdotes about her relaxed attitude to parenting.
Such as?
There's the time she avenged a slight by pissing in the sugar bowl of another local mom. There's the time she gives a customer head in the porn store. There's the time she finds a dead body in one of the store's, ahem, "jack shacks".
Live at the Apollo is surely just around the corner.
The routine about her husband's suicide attempt isn't a prime-time shoo-in.
Is it funny?
It's more chat than comedy; there's not much comedic craft on display. The one or two jokes I could discern – Levine compares a father's stake in an abortion decision with McDonald's claiming rights to the faeces derived from your Big Mac – elicit stony faces, not laughs, from tonight's crowd.
Ouch.
Yup, Levine died (in the on-stage way) on the night I saw her show. There were walk-outs, and the atmosphere they were leaving was one of tedium, not shock.
Any redeeming features?
At its best, Levine's set offers stark and unapologetic dispatches from an exotic life – exotic, at least, to largely middle-class Edinburgh audiences. But it's hard to see her gross-out humour and glib take on rape and abortion prospering without a rowdier and less beady audience than she got here.
Box office: 0844 693 3008. To 26 August.
