Pat's Fun House #3

Frankie Boyle

I went to see the Glaswegian Mock The Week/Pepamill Hero star on Sunday night at the Alexandra Theatre in Birmingham. Here's how it went:

Feeling knackered and hungover from getting pissed and dancing to a genius Mr Thing set at Funkbox on Saturday night (huge props to Cro & friends for Funkbox, a truly wicked night, and also to Averageman for putting me on to it), climbing to the Grand Circle of the Alexandra Theatre is not good for your head. I don't fear heights normally, but after the consumption of some medicinal herbals and the strength of the hangover, I was having that "zooming in whilst dollying away" effect going on in my brain that Hitchcock uses in Vertigo and that Spielberg riffed on in Jaws. We was up on some in the Gods type shit.

Anyway, we settled into our seats and got ready for a couple of hours of hilarity. The warm up guy came out and picked on some people in the audience, setting the tone for the evening by singling out a 16 year old girl who was with her mum and asking her about getting fingered behind the bins at the school disco. Ouch. Mr Warm Up finished off by saying "Frankie's coming out now. For those that haven't seen him before he's kinda like drinking 10 pints of Guinness: sooner or later you're gonna see some dark shit"

So out comes Frankie, hurling abuse at the front row immediately and absolutely slating Birmingham in that sarcastically-rich slow drawl. After some more interplay with the audience, he launched into a routine which covered all manner of bad taste subjects: child abuse, nonces, cunts and wanking, murder and some other shit, mostly new material with some stuff i'd heard off of Mock The Week before thrown in for good measure. He dropped some brutal lines "You see that Shannon Mathews: it's always the ugly ones who turn up alive...", most of which the crowd lapped up. Then about half way through he opened the show up to the audience by doing a sort of Q&A. So he invited people to shout out questions that he could then ramble on about and work some horrendously bad taste joke into. This kind of freestyling was quite incredible to witness as it was all off the cuff and all funny, but within the same dark tone as the rest of the performance. Very impressive.

Just to conclude then: Frankie Boyle = funny

My favourite line of the whole show was when someone shouted out "Jade Goody or Kerry Katona" and he mentioned that having sex with Jade Goody post-cancer op would be like fucking an open grave. Cott Dayam.