“Too dark and weird for mainstream success”? That’s how Martin Urbano describes himself in this fringe debut, albeit through so many veils of irony that I can’t be sure which self he’s describing. The persona he adopts of a reactionary sleazebag fallen foul of woke culture? Or the real Urbano, who co-opts that persona to peddle sexist, homophobic and paedophilic jokes? What tangled webs he weaves! It’s queasy fun to get caught in them. The gags might be gross, but they’re often hilariously so, and delivered with enough distance and mockery of lazy standup convention to license our aghast laughter.
He eases himself into it. Initially, jokes come at the general expense of hack comics, as New York-based Urbano cracks cliches about his Mexican heritage and cajoles us into this or that banal consensus (“How many people here know what an airport is?”). But soon his focus tightens, on to the kind of plain-speaking, saying-the-quiet-bits-out-loud material that shock-jock comics are convinced gets them cancelled. “I tickle a couple of ladies on the bus and suddenly I’m Harvey Weinstein!?”
The conceit is that Urbano has been #MeTooed, and this is his Apology Comeback Tour. In lieu of actual apology, there is aggrieved victimhood, and jokes that (as with Urbano’s confrere Jerry Sadowitz, whose show was pulled last year for its beyond-the-pale content) combine different brands of obnoxiousness to startling effect. See the one about Pornhub, or the one about Urbano joining a feminist march, which featured “women of all kinds, 1s through 10s”. The 29-year-old corpses frequently, signalling his arms-length relationship with the material and releasing the tension that accrues when nasty jokes elicit big laughter.
Good luck disentangling whether, finally, we’re laughing at misogyny and child abuse, or at a desperate comic who thinks they’re clever. In acknowledgment that the combination only takes us so far, Urbano latterly steps out of (partial) character to reflect on his reputation as “the paedophile comic”. That’s fun, too, although the interplay between these personae, the degree to which he’s ever one or the other, feels unresolved. But this remains an arresting introduction to an act poised indelicately between cancellation and a Netflix special.
At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 27 August
