Edinburgh Reviews #5: Tony Lee

Tony Lee: XXX Aggressive Comedy Hypnosis
Company: Tony Lee
Venue: Udderbelly – Pasture
Date: 21 Aug '07

Eew. This was frankly enough to make a liberal feel quite prudish. I don’t want to sound condescending, but here is a sample of Lee’s “aggressive comedy”:

“Now, when I clap my hands, you will believe the woman next to you has just done the smelliest, nastiest punany fart.”

I really did feel kind of out of place amongst a crowd who laughed at this. Many times, I found myself laughing more because I felt obliged to than because something was funny. The show was slow to get going, with Lee doing some wholly redundant stuff revolving around his liking to drink vodka during his show, which he indeed proceeded to do throughout the show. I mention this mainly to emphasize the adolescent and macho level on which the show operated. He then took a while doing some pretty pedestrian stuff to weed out those people who weren’t suggestible enough.

I don’t know what was worse, really: the boring start or the tacky and not-especially-funny second half. The climax of the evening was the most enthusiastic victim being persuaded, seeing as it was his birthday, that he was in fact one of the stars of “Puppetry of the Penis”. “Hilarity” ensued. The only interesting bit of the show was available for free – watching the faces of Lee’s volunteers as they emerged from the Udderbelly into the beer garden outside and remembered, as per hypnotic suggestion, everything they had done.

Depressing.

1/5

And that concludes Day 1 of my Edinburgh experience.