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MY COMEDY HERO FERN BRADY Blackfriars Basement, Glasgow, Fri 24 Mar; a live album recording of Male Comedienne is at The Stand, Edinburgh, Sun 26 Mar TALK JON RONSON Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, Thu 16 Mar; Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, Sun 19 Mar; Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow, Wed 22 Mar
I went to see Doug Stanhope in 2011 and my friend and I were the only women in an audience where all the men looked like truckers / murderers / both. I don’t know why more women in the UK aren’t into him: I overheard a feminist comic at a gig recently shouting that he’s a misogynist and it really bothered me because I think his general misanthropy gets mistaken for misogyny.
His podcast is excellent: it dispenses with the usual format of having celebrity
guests and instead plays host to the colourful residents from Bisbee, Arizona (Stanhope eschewed LA to live in the middle of nowhere). I’ve always been interested in comedians who use real-life stories for their shows so in that sense I’m massively influenced by him. A comedian who knows Stanhope told me that he deliberately seeks out mad
experiences to use for comedy: I also used to constantly get into ridiculous situations just to have a good story to tell eg. the two and a half years I spent working in Edinburgh’s strip clubs as possibly the worst lap dancer of all time. I just hope there comes a day when women can talk about sex stuff and it’ll simply be seen as funny and not ‘why do female comedians always do sexual material?’ It’s already happened in the US with stuff like Broad City and Chelsea Handler, so fingers crossed it’s in the post. (As told to Brian Donaldson) ■ See more at list.co.uk/comedy
He might shirk from the phrase ‘timeless’ being used about his work, but Jon Ronson’s topics are refusing to go away. The journalist’s print and broadcast work has covered extremism (Them), social media (So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed), and men who stare at goats (OK, that might be a little more niche).
With his latest touring show he revisits The Psychopath Test, his 2011 book which explored some high-profile as well as rarely read cases, relating them to the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, a 20-point test which claimed to conclusively detect psychopathic tendencies. As you might expect, Ronson has problems with such sweeping diagnoses.
‘One of the items on the checklist is impulsivity and another item is being cunning and manipulative, but how can you be both?’ he wonders. ‘If you put those to one side, the nuances of psychopathic behaviour have been anatomised by Hare in a brilliant way, but it is a very powerful weapon that gets misused constantly.’ For Psychopath Night, he’s joined onstage by two people who have been at the sharp end of, in one case, psychopathic behaviour and, in the other, the vagaries of the 20-point test. In broader terms, the world suddenly appears to be in the hands of less than lucid individuals. ‘Through the book, what I learned about psychopaths is that they have moulded society,’ notes Ronson. ‘And capitalism at its most ruthless is a physical manifestation of psychopathy.’ (Brian Donaldson)
LOCAL LAUGHS RACHEL JACKSON EDINBURGH COMIC AND ACTRESS HAS A GO AT OUR Q&A
Can you tell us about the moment when you thought: ‘stand-up is for me’? When people kept laughing at my life so I thought, ‘I may as well get paid for this’. Do you have any pre-show rituals? Pacing up and down the corridor. Every time. Even if there’s not a corridor.
just you up there. If it’s good, all on you. If it’s bad, all on you. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received from another comedian so far? I was told to keep being weird. I have always been told I’m weird anyway and I have a bit of a persona I like to play around with. At the end of the day, we’re all freaks, right?
How do you handle hecklers? I date them. Where do you draw the line when it comes to ‘offensive comedy’? I truly live by RuPaul’s message: ‘if it’s funny you can get away with anything’.
What’s the one thing you remember about your very first stand-up gig? My first solo show, Memoirs of a Bunny Boiler, was a sort of stand- up / one-woman play mash-up and I remember being terrified as it’s
Which comedian’s memoir would you recommend to someone? I liked Steve Coogan’s a lot because his career is a bit of an inspiration to me. I want to keep creating mad characters people know and love, and then a few years down the line shock everyone with how good my straight acting is too. ■ Rachel Jackson: Force of Nature, Wild Cabaret, Glasgow, Wed 15 Mar; Bunny Boiler’s Dating Vlog can be seen now on BBC Three online. See more of this q&a at list.co.uk/ comedy
1 Feb–31 Mar 2017 THE LIST 55 1 Feb–31 Mar 2017 THE SLIST 55