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.
The other development in Boyle’s comedy is a slight loosening of the straitjacket in which his twisted vision is presented to us. The battery of gags relents a little, and there’s more of himself in there. His kids make an appearance; so too his mournful Donegal parents, who feature for a second show running.
But it’s a question of degree: your main take-home will still be the 49-year-old’s breathtakingly rude and brilliantly assembled jokes, which here dissect rapist policemen, Irish folk songs, Keir Starmer (“if he ran at a pigeon, it wouldn’t move”) and the feelings other serial killers harbour for Harold Shipman. Time after time, Boyle’s vision and violent lyricism catches your breath – because they’re so alarming, and because there’s an honesty to them that cuts through the blandifying white noise, revealing our brutal-as-Boyle world, if only for a joke’s length, in its true colours.
• At Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, until 28 August.
