“It’s not always a happy talent, being reflexively horrible to people,” says Frankie Boyle. “But it’s the one I’ve got.” Well, yes and no. As his recent Guardian columns have shown, there’s more to Boyle than the garish abuse of famous people that defined him in his Mock the Week sub-prime. Exile from the telly has been good for him: this new live show is a more honest, varied and enjoyable affair than previous stage outings, while seldom stinting on the brutal black humour that gives his comedy its Stygian depths charge.
What emerges more than in his earlier shows is a sense of who Boyle is and what – aside from making us shudder – he stands for. Of course, the jokes are still nasty: the set opens in an arson-blaze of gags about paedophilia, as marathon man Jimmy Savile outruns his escaping prey, and cherubs evolve wings to slip the reach of lascivious priests. But the register changes when the routine graduates to pervy politicians. “They kill kids!”, bellows Boyle, for whom contested claims of Westminster child abuse pale next to the warmongering of which our political class seems not only unashamed, but proud.
He adopts the same tone – as if grabbing our lapels and shaking us – when he addresses austerity. Don’t blame immigrants, he screams at us, or the benefit scroungers: “it was the fucking banks!” It’s his dismay that’s funny, at these vast crimes carried out in plain sight, and at our bovine acquiescence. The luridness of his comedy becomes a cosh to batter the complacency out of us, as with a withering mickey-take of Ukip as oafish nostalgists for the non-existent “good old days” (generating no small frisson here in Ukip’s Essex heartland) and a set piece asking “How are British elites created?”, casting the English public school system as a sociopath factory spitting out love-starved abusers.
It’s as vicious as ever, in other words. But more targeted: less a parade of indiscriminate cynicism, more a concerted attack on the ruling class and their ideologies, using sick jokes as hand grenades. And as for the queasiness of those gags, well, Boyle mounts a defence here of offensive comedy, arguing that “you can’t argue with a joke – it’s like telling a clown their car won’t pass its MOT”, and for comedians as licensed envelope-pushers, whose propriety-baiting should be exempt from reproach.
You may not agree. But it’s great to hear the real Boyle – more easeful than before, more intimate – give an account of himself. It creates a context in which the uncomplicated one-liners can really sing, and there are plenty of those tonight too, like the one about the TV documentary on stroke victims, or the one about Steve Jobs’ premature death. In the past, these were all you got from Boyle, they soon outstayed their welcome. But here, they’re palate cleansers between more heartfelt routines demonstrating his convictions about the world. “I know it’s boring,” he says, “but we’re going to have to engage more with politics.” But Boyle’s politics – call them simplistic, cynical or savage – aren’t boring in the slightest.
• At the Barbican, York, on Saturday 24 October, then touring. Box office: 0844-854 2757.
