Empire Theatre, Eden Court, 31 March 2009

Jerry Sadowitz

WHEN I was a small boy on the Wirral my Gran used to take me to see the Punch and Judy show on the sea front at New Brighton. I was always a little scared of Mr Punch, with his hooked nose, starring eyes and violent temper he was a sinister character, a puppet bogey man.

As a boy I used to have nightmares that Mr Punch would somehow follow me home and invade the sanctuary of my bedroom. Many years have passed now since my childhood day trips and memories of my lavender scented grandmother have faded. I had even forgotten my terror of Mr Punch, pushed it into the darkest recesses of my mind … or at least I had, until last night, when Jerry Sadowitz took to the stage at Eden Court.

There, unmistakably, in the persona of Mr Sadowitz, was Mr Punch. He had grown up as well, the pointed hat with bells had been replaced by a top hat, but the prominent nose and the wicked glint in his eyes were still there – he even still had his stick. Mr Punch had found me.

Sadowitz is probably the most uncompromising comedian in Britain today. He is, as they say, mad, bad and dangerous to know. In the opening two minutes of his act he unleashed enough profanity to shock my Grandmother into several seizures and seriously wound most of my aunts. If there had been a swear box in the theatre it would have collected enough money by the end of the show for the Bank of England to declare the recession over.

Dressed in his top hat with wild hair escaping beneath it, Sadowitz’s personality filled the theatre from the moment he stepped on to the stage. He is an intimidating character on stage and anyone unlucky enough to have sat in the front row must have had a tense evening.

From the outset he began a systematic destruction of every pretentious politically correct doctrine Radio 4 has ever held dear. No one is safe from the scorn of Sadowitz, no religion, no ethnic group escapes his scathing tongue. He even reserves his harshest comments for himself and his own Jewish origins.

His comedy is breathtakingly fast as he machine guns every liberal, right-thinking Guardian reader he can find. I found myself continually asking myself, “Should I be laughing at this?” Before I could answer the question Sadowitz had moved on and was happily slaughtering another sacred cow, before barbecuing it over the intense heat of his intelligence, and force feeding it to the vegetarians on the front row.

Sadowitz is as fine a magician as he is a comedian. He performed a series of card tricks and other illusions throughout the show. These were shown projected on to a screen behind him so that the audience could see, or rather not see, the skill of his sleight of hand. The magic blended well with the comedy and provided entertaining respite from the barrage of jolting humour that he performed for the greater part of his act.

Sadowitz is a superb showman; in earlier eras he would have been equally at home in a circus tent, on the stage at a Victorian music hall or warming up the audience at a Roman colosseum before offering the lions their Christian lunch.

Was he obscene? Yes, certainly. But was he offensive? The second question is much harder to answer. This is no Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown, knocking laughs out of an audience of morons with a series of blue gags. What Sadowitz is doing is far more subtle, more subversive and more dangerous.

A man who hates everything and everyone actually hates no one. Perhaps that is the irony of this man. The controversial nature of his material will probably ensure that you never see Sadowitz with his own special on TV and that is a pity, because he deserves greater public exposure.

Unfortunately there isn’t a watershed late enough to allow for Sadowitz. Towards the end of his act he took a moment to rage against other comedians, including Bill Hicks. Yet there is something of Hicks in Sadowitz’s style. He, like Hicks, is a comedian with the ability to make the audience think, to challenge their perceptions of the world. If you are offended by Sadowitz, maybe you have missed the point. Perhaps there is more to Mr Punch than meets the eye.

© John Burns, 2009

Links

• Jerry Sadowitz
• John Burns at Purple Comedy