“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!?”
