Who are the Jocks?

Woe betide any Fringe punter who wanders into Who are the Jocks? anticipating a breezy exposition on Scotland and its characters. The jocks in Scott Capurro’s latest show aren’t the Krankies, Billy Connolly or Clare Grogan – they’re the American football players who topped the Columbine killers’ hitlist. And Capurro hasn’t come to mourn their passing.

"Controversial" has been an epithet attached to Capurro’s comedy ever since the stick-thin, nasal Californian won best newcomer at the 1994 Fringe. Now living in East London, if the one-time Mrs Doubtfire star ("I played a gay. I know, hard to picture") has mellowed with age it doesn’t show. There are riffs on Islamic fundamentalism, Madeleine McCann and the Holocaust – and that’s just the opening salvo (by the end of which a couple of folk, perhaps expecting quips about sporrans and Nessie, have made for the exit).

Capurro might make Frankie Boyle look like Michael McIntyre but, unlike many supposedly transgressive comics, he knows his way around a gag, even if the routine in question involves simulating oral sex with Christ.

The show hinges on two events—the death of his mother and a disastrous show in Cardiff—which are woven through the gleeful tirade of offense and filth with much aplomb. But Capurro is at his best when ripping into the audience about their looks, ethnicity and preferred sexual positions. Bawdy, edged, thrillingly quick witted: slaying sacred cows is seldom this funny.