Review by Paul Fleckney

One of the worst shows I’ve ever seen. For anyone who’s ever got a bus at around 4pm and been stuck at the back with a load of 12-year-olds, an hour in Alex Williamson’s company feels about the same. At least they have the excuse that they’re young – Williamson is 27 and still whines that he wishes life was like Grand Theft Auto where you can just take out your anger on a prostitute. He makes Dapper Laughs look like Shami Chakrabarti.

Half his material comes back to fingering, or wanking, or dick pics, snigger snigger. I like a knob gag as much as the next person – i.e. a lot – but Williamson doesn’t really have any gags, just a series of depressing stories.

It’s not just juvenile, it’s nasty. The ease that Williamson throws the word 'rape' around is troubling. Rape appears to be a constant source of amusement for him. In one story, he molests a 'small, timid' woman he doesn’t know, just because her boyfriend insists he does. That’s the story. He comes up with the bright idea of having sex with an underage girl so that he gets extradited and saves himself an air fair back to his native Australia. We should look to the animal world for inspiration, he says, gorillas don’t stand on ceremony they just drag a female into a cave whenever they want. Oh Alex, you had me at 'drag'.

He claims not to be aggressive, as he’s not a fighter, but I’ve never seen such a sexually aggressive show. Aside from all the above, he pulls out a newspaper article about how messy Edinburgh gets during the festival. The piece does sound pretty pious admittedly, but woah, the number of times Williamson calls the journalist a slut, and the vitriol with which he says it…

Then there are some hack observations about drugs, and moody emo songs that tread much the same water as the rest of the show. Williamson has around 500,000 YouTube subscribers and he doesn’t have any problems selling tickets, so there’s clearly still a market for knuckle-dragging laddishness.

He revels in being a comic that gets up the nose of the PC brigade (aka the bully’s defence), as if he’s doing bold, outspoken comedy, rather than hostile, insecure comedy, which is what it is. Negative reviews no doubt harden his resolve. If wishing for even the most basic level of common decency now counts as 'political correctness', then that’s a pretty depressing thought.

Review date: 27 Aug 2015
Reviewed by: Paul Fleckney
Reviewed at: Gilded Balloon Teviot