A friend of Frankie Boyle’s, he tells us, stopped watching standup because it’s either “clever but not funny, or funny but not clever”. Boyle, of course, is an exception: his work makes you think, or has you marvelling at its merciless vision, even as it prompts laugh after appalled laugh. It also, these days, questions itself. As on his 2019 tour, the Glaswegian is still puzzling out the value of his nasty comedy in our ever-nastier world. Are necrophilia gags justifiable? Should he only tell jokes whose ethical intentions are clear?
Cynics, who presumably form a significant quotient in his audience, might think Boyle is having it both ways here – distancing himself from his jokes’ ghastliness while continuing (“If your favourite texture is a corpse’s clitoris …”) to tell ghastly jokes. But it’s certainly true that he cracks fewer gratuitously mean gags than he used to, and that most of his wee horror show constructions serve to amplify an opinion or rocket-fuel some political argument – burlesquing the inequities of the royal family or Richard Branson, say, or desecrating the pious conceit that work should be personally fulfilling. Or indeed affirming his own low moral stature, as per the gags about trying to have sex with a Nazi.
