Review from the Glasgow International Comedy Festival

Surveying the dreadful, divided state of X, formerly known as Twitter, nowadays, you'd be forgiven for forgetting what a democratising effect it had on humour in its heyday. 

For every Rob Delaney, a jobbing stand-up who blew up on the platform, there were thousands of non-performers and anonymous wits who enjoyed often brief yet viral acclaim for crafting the great topical gag on whatever was in the news.

Crowdsourcing jokes on an epic scale, it made some careers. But without wishing to get overly nostalgic, it also felt like thousands of monkeys at typewriters bashing out funnier lines than Shakespeare on an industrial scale. Just for the joy of entertaining others.

In significance and content, Fesshole feels like X's last days of Rome. Not least as its creator and curator Rob Manuel takes the stage for this live adaptation in a bishop's outfit, leading those assembled in the Lord's Prayer.

With a million followers, the account records in often memorable detail the anonymous confessions of the Great British public, with masturbation and defecation high in the mix. There is nowt as queer as folk. And whether all of the confessions are completely true is by-the-by. Everyone loves a great tale of abject humiliation or roguery. And the potential response of hundreds of likes and being ‘seen’ seems to be sufficient incentive to tell your story entertainingly. It's salacious gossip for the digital era.

This live show is essentially a greatest hits package, the funniest and most popular tweets, bookended by the story of how Manuel set the account up and in-the-room confessions from brave and foolhardy audience members.

Even without the ill-health afflicting him this evening, Manuel is not the most relaxed or confident performer. And his introduction, on how he developed the scurrilous meme farm website B3ta and popular bots on Twitter such as the Swearing Clock and Yoko Ono Bot - generating leftfield, maxims accurate enough that her son, Sean, would get into dialogues with it - ironically suffers from the online maven's inability to work his PowerPoint slickly.

Less forgivably perhaps, he often slightly paraphrases the lines even as they appear on screen, very noticeably reading rather than reciting, making for a jarring audio-visual disconnect.

But there's no arguing with the Black Mirror-like, yet knockabout familial farce of the Ono interactions, with (the real?) Sean Ono Lennon having clearly enjoyed and even invested to an extent in the exchanges. And the sheer darkness of the September 11 memes that found their way onto B3ta say something profound about humanity, if you can pause to think while laughing through the more outrageously sick ones. Ripped from their original contexts, far from everything flies. But Manuel clearly has a talent for setting up online repositories for boundary-pushing laughter.

Once he gets onto Fesshole proper, he's made the smart decision to extrapolate data from the mass of contributions he's received, to draw persuasive conclusions about the state of the nation's psyche, even searching for keywords like 'Glasgow' on this occasion to give a local flavour.

Without wishing to underplay the extent to which he's curated the most entertaining results and not to provide too many spoilers, there's sufficient evidence to dissuade anyone to ever use a hotel kettle again. And many, many left-leaning people have sordid sexual fantasies about right-wing politicians.

With Manuel sharing the first half of a tweet, before revealing the second-half and effective punchline, the best often have a level of detail that seems to defy contrivance and a universality that strikes a chord in the room, particularly in getting revenge on boorish exes or getting one over on The Man.

A couple of tales of one-night stands that found men (naturally), channelling their humiliation or difficulties into then robbing their conquest seem ill-judged and strike a really sour, misogynistic note. But historically, the most popular Fesshole tweets have eschewed jokes and are pocket encapsulations of tragic poignancy, utterly flattening the room, no matter how many times you may have seen them circulated in WhatsApp groups.

Something about an individual sharing such extreme vulnerability, albeit anonymously, forges a rare sense of shared humanity, whether that be through expressing the death of a loved one, or, just a bus driver sharing the mischievous way they express their hatred of their passengers when they're having a tough day.

Without the quality control of Fesshole's back catalogue to choose from, the confessions sourced on the night are of more varied entertainment value. But the most memorable, with the perpetrators standing up to admit their crimes elicit a huge response for their wit and daring, a moment to be celebrated as a folk hero for getting one back on teenage ne'er do wells terrorising a train. Or just admitting that your dad wore that hat the teenage you regularly wanked into.

Like its X account, Fesshole Live is a real curate's egg, emblematic of so much comedy on the internet, hilarious, humane, moving and raw but also often instantly forgettable or eye-openingly depraved. Worth experiencing though, before Elon Musk fully destroys the platform.

• The Glasgow International Comedy Festival, runs until Sunday July 31.

Review date: 22 Mar 2024
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Glasgow Oran Mor