Comedy review: Alun Cochrane, Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
Alun Cochrane, Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh * * * *
Having the vagaries of the toxic woke attacked in a gentle West Yorkshire burr by a comic best know for whimsical observations about manual transmission cars is a marvellous new experience.
Cochrane takes the 'more in sorrow and bewilderment than in anger' approach and it really works. He treats, he says, his audiences like grown ups. And assumes that if we hear something we don't like we will be able to get over it. Alongside a superb diatribe against the current trend to class words as actual violence , he has a go at motivational porn, self-induced disability, tiptoeing round people's feelings and thought crimes.
This is as dangerous as you will hear this month. He tackles religion and leaves it quivering on the floor, his take on Brexit is like nothing else you will listen to this month, when he ventures into LGBT territory he goes armed with some serious thought bombs and Sophie Hagan fans will be lining up to deplatform him for his material on the morbidly obese, Alun is the most reasonable of men and this is not just a step out of his comfort zone, he has got a new passport and gone walkabout in lands that have a Travel Warning from the Comedy Office.
It is wonderful, powerful, unexpectable stuff from a comic who still crafts some of the most listenable-to lines in the business.
Until 25 August