It’s difficult to convey the essence of a Rick Shapiro performance. His intensity rolls over the audience leaving them at the mercy of his volatile yet poignant rants and character vignettes, continually breaking the pace with non-sequiturs packed with shock value. He doesn’t rely on anything so obvious as a series of snappy punchlines, he leaps into the stream of consciousness and pours out a tsunami of transgression that swamps your funny bone.

Shapiro is renowned for his hour-long sets that often go over-time because he’s on an improvisational roll. He’s also known for having one of the most difficult backgrounds of any comedian currently performing and using it fearlessly in his sets – many comedians talk about their brushes with drug addiction and the struggle to get/stay “clean”, but Shapiro is the only one who also talks about how his drug habit and prostitution hustling fed into each other. There’s nothing fluffy here (except for that disturbing rabbit bit…).

Shapiro bores straight through offensive into a realm of fundamental honesty about humanity’s base existential urges and ingrained prejudices that overwhelms people who would probably walk out on similar jokes from anybody else. AIDS, paedophiles, gang-banging footballers, suicide, terrorists, incest – it’s all touched on so fast that he’s on to the next taboo before you’ve fully absorbed the last one (but then he dwells on one and riffs deeper and deeper as you disbelieve your ears). I can’t imagine any other comedian getting away with so blatantly hitting on an attractive woman in the front row that both she and her boyfriend were crying with laughter at the extremes of his bluntly pornographic fantasies about her. Expect to find yourself laughing at something before your intellect catches up with the disgust/despair response, and then Shapiro will twist it to make you see it in yet a different light.

Highly recommended for those who want to see truly risky avant-garde stand-up. It’s a rare opportunity.

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