DVD review by Steve Bennett

Frankie Boyle’s new DVD - his last if his claims to be retiring from stand-up are sincere - is as brutal and as unforgiving as you might expect. From the moment he walks imperiously on stage he gives audience members a verbal pummelling for the sin of merely straying into his eyeline. There’s no attempt at pandering charm. Humanity is contemptible scum – including his fans – and he’s here to ensure there’s no doubt of the fact.

But no one buying this DVD can be taken by surprise by his viciousness, given the amount of tabloid coverage his vile one-liners encourage. ‘You never see a shit comedian involved in a controversy,’ he opines on the furores that are whipped up around him. And by that measure, he’s an excellent comedian.

Indeed, by many other measures, too. If you accept that he operates in a moral vacuum, the gags are bluntly efficient, the graphic imagery almost poetic in its nihilistic nastiness. And he keeps piling them on in an onslaught that – inevitably – suffers from diminishing returns. Even if, by his standards, this is a more conversational set, the viewer gets punch-drunk by it all and lines that maintain the inventive quality, become lost in the desensitisation.

Between the brutality, he makes some attempt to explain his position. He thinks we’ve become a lobotomised 'zombie culture', and we need the short, sharp shock of his jokes to make us feel anything at all, even if that makes him ‘hated by morons’. It’s a dubious reasoning; more accurate might be his admission that his instinct to offend is a ‘curse’ that he cannot control.

It’s only when he’s kicking down that this becomes an issue; and he might be best advised not rake over the controversy regarding Katie Price’s son again. But he does. ‘Well-advised’ and Frankie Boyle don’t really belong in the same sentence.

He offers other justification that jokes are only fictions, that the disabled shouldn’t be thought of as helpless victims that need to be protected from them, and that his brand of horrible humour is some sort of catharsis.

Perhaps more worrying is the fan interviewed outside Glasgow’s Kings Theatre in a brief vox pop preamble, who asserts: ‘He’s saying what everyone's thinking.’ I would hope not, he’s saying what no one is thinking, and that’s the point.

However, there are some targets here that seem over-punched. The idea of a Michael Jackson Children’s Hospital rakes over the same ground a thousand lesser comics have covered, with not much greater effects. But then his character assassinations of the likes of John Terry, Ricky Gervais and Boris Johnson are more on target.

But asking Boyle to focus his ire would be like asking a hurricane just to pick off certain houses. You can argue with a destructive force.

Published: 7 Dec 2012