Fin Taylor: Whitey McWhiteface

Well, he certainly knows his audience. The crowd on the night I attended were pale, packed and sweating like Spam on a windowsill, giddy with the incredible heat of The Counting House. This was going to be a white guy talking about white stuff to a room full of white people – a description that covers 99% of Fringe shows.

And yes, initially this is white people at play, a Seurat painting. Taylor uses ‘white’ interchangeably with ‘middle class’ (not as easy a substitution in Scotland as in West London, but again, Taylor knows who’s showing up) and riffs on the lifetime of farmers' markets that stretch out in front of them. They are observations that have been made before, but Taylor hones lines until they’re lethal, and the audience loves it. What are we like?! That’s so us.

It’s when he uses this skill to carry them into trickier areas that this gets impressive. Whiteness (or at least Guardian-white) is recast as a series of self-imposed and ridiculous divisions: everyone is "white but…", a means of partly absolving yourself. Again, this is more about left-wing bickering, an ingenious tactic that somehow makes it all about us.

White skin is bulletproof when it comes to racial offence, but its Taylor’s aim is to keep hitting until he leaves a mark. There is collateral damage and poorly chosen targets on the way and, as Taylor points out, it’s his privilege as a white male comedian that he’s able to do this. Yet by the end, as he turns up the heat, the laughs are harder won but better earned.

Maybe we white people deserve to sweat, at least a little.