Jerry Sadowitz - 'Comedian, Magician, Psychopath! 2024' Review - 19th March, The Wardrobe, Leeds
Jerry Sadowitz - 'Comedian, Magician, Psychopath! 2024' review at The Wardrobe, Leeds - dark comedy legend seems to enjoy playing the villain, with the brilliantly cut-throat material and impressive magical skill to go along with it
I’ll get this out of the way now, this probably won’t be as in-depth as my regular reviews for a couple of reasons. One because Jerry doesn’t really like people giving away too much of his material, understandably so, and two, because he moves at a million miles an hour for ninety straight minutes, it’d be almost impossible for me to be as forensic as I usually am, but in a way, that’s an appeal of the show itself: a ninety minute breakneck marathon of absolute filth, which for me, is absolutely a selling point. So much so that the fun starts before the act even officially begins, as we hear over the speaker that “Scotland’s answer to Frankie Boyle and BBC Best New Paedophile Award Winner” is about to take to the stage, and once he does, grey hair streaking from his trademark top hat, the act hardly lets up. As a way of “settling the audience in”, he starts with some good old conjuring tricks, hilariously pulling all the usual animals from a variety of unusual orifices, some of which aren’t even animals, but the amusing, and slightly disgusting alternatives I’ll leave to your imagination. I’ll admit an impromptu jazz number wasn’t anticipated, but the following seething tirade against modern pop music certainly was. Now what in most other comics’ hands would be a routine that all too closely echoes the old man yells at cloud meme (same applies to his routine about young people being a load of spoilt, gay, gullible wet wipes), Jerry elevates to another level. Not only are the insults as brutal as they are ridiculous, but his lording of previous high points in musical achievement seems equally as tongue in cheek, reminding us of the fact that, to put it one way, some great artists have said some fucked up shit. Of course he plays it off brilliantly, although not before giving us a few renditions of past hits of his own, including jolly little ditties about Madelin McCann and vicarious foetus sex. This might sound horrific, but as he reminds us, “I don’t want to say it any more than you want to hear it.” Are you sure about that?
As for the rest of his material, as the show moves on, the worse and more vile his rants seem to get, and resultantly, oftentimes the worse they get, the funnier they are. Now I understand that might make me sound like a morally bankrupt areshole, but I’m pretty sure I can explain. For one thing, his lambasting of punk music as a bunch of posing, moaning South London twats, or his assertion that cockneys are “stupid thieving cunts who think their special cos they wear buttons” are I think indicative of a kind of hilarious rage we’ve all experienced at some point in. our lives, where all hope of a reasonable “argument” going out the window, instead where your rage for a thing reaches so far it escalates into a variety of increasingly animated, descriptive and sometimes nonsensical insults and gestures, as if you’re battling with yourself to see just how hyperbolically mean you can possibly be. As it happens, and as Jerry decidedly proves, watching that unfold in front of you is, in a twisted way, gloriously funny. There were some points throughout the show where he picked up a pack of cards, as if to start a magic trick, only to be derailed and put off course by his own seething anger at any number of subjects, which must’ve happened around three or four times. The sheer intensity of the “AND ANOTHER FUCKING THING” approach is frankly a marvel. He’s like a machine gun, a sick, twisted, hysterical machine gun. If anything this is just more pronounced when covering more objectionable topics. In my head at least, there reaches a point with Jerry, not where it stops being funny, but more when what could be thought to be genuine rage verges on farce, resulting in a whole different type of laugh, one that’s as hearty as it is morally conflicted. Point being, surely nobody could hear his cheerleading or sexual attraction to Lucy Letby, the idea that the economy is failing because it’s “run by women and black people”, his wish to mandate rape and murder, his jolly escapades with a group of sex assaulters, or his disappointment at not having his own rich man sex dungeon to maniacally laugh at his victims in, seriously at all. It’s so ridiculously fucked up and outrageous that you almost can’t help but laugh. By a similar token, his comments about Chinese people being a load of stupid, spine bent yellow dwarves (“I’ve met them all, and hate them all individually”), or his outrage at the number of spastics on TV, both in comedy and otherwise, with a number of comical impersonations, are so cartoonishly evil that getting offended almost seems pointless, not that that would make a difference, as Jerry laments being banned from venues “he’s not even been to.” It’s almost like watching the one man show of a pantomime villain, with some brilliantly cutting punchlines and physical comedy bits along with it.
It’s also I think safe to say that Jerry’s relationship with the powers that be at large is quite an interesting one. Like many people, and particularly sensically for his misanthrope stage persona, he looks at them with disdain, a load of posh, ruling class, stuck up fuckers messing things up for everyone. People so stupid that they couldn’t even colour in a kids book properly, so obviously he takes delight in spitting all over them. Of course prominent figures like Nicola Sturgeon and Rishi Sunak are targets for his ire, but best believe he spits across both political isles, with his lambasting of characters like George Galloway or Diane Abbott being even more savage than the rest, one of many points where you don’t know whether to laugh or recoil at the brutality of it. Mostly, I seemed to go with the first option, sometimes it was both though, as let’s be honest, Jerry’s admission that for some reason he can’t do an impression of George Galloway without sounding like “a Welsh Pakistani” lends to results as ridiculous as they sound. Naturally, his attention also turns to the controversial political figures of the world, the Trumps, Netanyahus and the Putins, for some more topical material, only his treatment of them isn’t so straightforward. By this point I think you’ll agree that if all of a sudden he came out and went “these are very bad men”, it would feel quite jarring. He’d have to change tact, and that he does, in a couple different ways. Letting Donald Trump off lightly because “at least he’s entertaining” amongst other things is certainly humorous enough, but he has bigger fish to fry. In Putin’s case, while a bit of wry cheerleading and fist-pumping was sort of to be expected, equally, his apparent appraisal of his comedic abilities, only to then morph into making light of his previous atrocities, or indeed just the stuff that comes out of his mouth, is anything even funnier, showing you just how ridiculous and farcical all this really is, a fair bit better and more acerbic than any of your other shiny suit satirists making the rounds. In the case of Netenyahu though, despite his Jewish heritage, Jerry makes it very clear that his allegiance certainly doesn’t fall that way, giving in graphic detail what he believes to be an American assisted plot for a Middle Eastern coup. Of course, he’s also sure to take the piss out of people’s high and mighty political activism at the same time, playing on the idea of people’s wilful ignorance in certain circumstances. As he puts it: “if people were honest and just said, ‘you can keep all your petrol if we kill all the Palestinians’, you’d probably go, ‘eh, well, I mean, to be fair…’” I would go into a little more detail, but as I said, his act sometimes moves so quickly it’s hard to remember, so you’ll just have to trust me when I say it was a fair bit funnier than I’m putting across.
What people might find more uncomfortable though is when some of his rants take a decidedly conspiratorial tone, like when downplaying the severity of the COVID pandemic, or asserting that there’s a global cabal of evil Chinese people taking over the world. Normally this kind of tinfoil hat nonsense would make my face shrink inside itself with cringe, and I wouldn’t blame readers for getting the same impression. However, the thing is, he puts across these opinions and character portrayals with such a palpable level of sarcasm, snark and hyperbolic, James Bond villainy that I can’t help but feel that there must be some level of figurative “wink-wink-nudge-nudge”-ing going on. Similar treatment is also given to his putting forward that ADHD and autism don’t really exist, or his mocking of modern gender politics, although at least in the latter case, there may well be a reality to his irascibility, so to go with the irony argument maybe a touch charitable, although the sheer hamming up of that same anger, like in many instances, does definitely help it go down easier than in, say, a Jim Davidson bit.
That in itself though is the key to much of Jerry’s material: irony. It’s an excuse that fart-sniffing journalists like myself like to use when defending Jerry’s material against “Manning with magic” accusations, with good reason I might add, but especially in recent times, it seems Jerry has caught onto this perception, and takes great delight in playing around with it, to great comical effect. As he says himself, he says some things just for spite, some he means, others not, slowly falling down the layers of irony until you’re eventually standing on stage doing a Nazi impression. Where that line is, you’re not really supposed to know, and to be honest, I don’t think he knows sometimes. Obviously his confessions of necrophilia, incest, or his reprise of his brutally funny Jimmy Saville material praising the calibre of Yorkshire serial killers have a level of obvious facetion and cartoon bigotry to them, but elsewhere, he takes the liberty of toying with it a bit more. The perfect example would be his material on Dianne Abbot, using the recent news of a Conservative donor’s alleged racist comments to push the level of vileness towards her further than all reasonable acceptability. Obviously he claims such comments are true, and has a few choice ones at his own, but all done with a sense of a wry eyebrow raising sarcasm and Tory fun poking as to where even a fairly liberal audience would have no qualms laughing at the pure bile of it. Then there’s the question though: Is it sarcastic? Well, I think to figure that out is a bit of a fool’s errand, as all you’ll get from Jerry’s end is a series of “yes, no, absolutely, of course not, maybe, I don’t know”, so let’s just say for the sake of my moral compass and indeed perhaps his own, I hope so, at least that way it’s a lot funnier. Same with his material about calling Rishi Sunak a “paki” or allegedly flashing his junk at people. These were moments that had even Jerry’s defenders furrowing their brows in the press, and he knows this. As such, he breaches this material in a way as frank as it is defiantly hilarious, saying essentially “I never actually said those things, but since I got banned for them, I may as well live up to expectation”, and thus seems to delight in being as brash as possible, which, along with his repeated sardonic reminders of “remember boys and girls, context” from that point on actually displays more of a kind of sharp tongued cheekiness than I would’ve expected, a far cry from the potential “mask-slipping” it was characterised as elsewhere, and a hell of a lot more entertaining.
Then finally, to bookend the show, Jerry gives us a handful more magic tricks from up his metaphorical sleeve, and some of them are absolutely genius, but perhaps not for the most obvious reasons. The cleverness, is if anything, in the whiplash of it. In one breath, he’ll rattle off a handful of sometimes purposefully shit, yet hilarious Tommy Cooper style illusions, such as having various “hidden cards” start flying out his pockets, or sometimes just give away a trick completely half way through as if to mockingly go, “yeah, it’s fucking shit this innit?” Glorious every time. Then, out of nowhere, he’ll all of a sudden pull of a still hilarious, yet genuinely impressive sleight of hand that makes you go “oh yeah, he’s one of the top magicians in the world”, and honestly, I could make an argument for going to see the show just for that, although the rather disgusting and graphic rorschach tests that follow it, while getting an absolutely riotous audience response, like all of his act, probably wouldn’t be so well received by those with fragile sensibilities, or stomachs. It seems like Jerry’s more than OK with that though, as many of his contemporaries get the bile with both barrels as much as anyone else, playfully characterising Derren Brown as an NLP-peddling, smug, shiny shoed twonk, and putting forward the assertion that “giving pigeons the gift of flight is like giving the gift of magic to Dynamo”, and it won’t surprise you to learn that’s FAR AND AWAY the nicest bit, the fact he accidentally spat on someone mid-rant should be a good indication of as much. He seems fine to operate his own lane, do his own thing, and I think the audience are perfectly fine with that too.
As the show begins to wrap up though, Jerry seems wary of the fact his career may be doing the same, and perhaps has been doing so for years now. As he brilliantly puts it: “I’m in The Wardrobe now, by next year I’ll be in the fucking Spoon Cupboard.” With the Hate Crime Bill coming through Scotland, and ridiculously allowing performers as targets, he sees his time as perhaps being limited, despite wryly observing that jail would “improve his life.” So, as a finale to the show, he concocts a way to continue peddling his “crack cocaine of comedy”: ventriloquism. Ah, a second degree of culpability, very clever indeed sir. To cap off then, we’re given a short and sweet preview and some of his covertly veiled material, and let’s just say it concluded proceedings in spectacularly outrageous fashion. It got the biggest laugh of the night from me (that’s really saying something, let me tell you), and the applause that followed showed an audience sure in the knowledge they’d just witnessed a comedy masterclass. What the punchline was I won’t even begin to spoil here, I’ve done quite enough of that already, but what I will implore you to do, is buy his tickets and see for yourself, because I think he’s fucking brilliant.
In summation, going into this, I really didn’t know what to expect. Given the mythology built around the pure objectionability of his recent material, and his polarising reputation even within the comedy world, I didn’t know whether to prep for a night of brilliantly misanthropic and brutal stand up, or just an hour and a half hate fest with some magic thrown in, and I’m thrilled to report that I absolutely got the former. It’s still crushingly brutal, let that not be understated, but he’s nothing like Jim Davidson, or Bernard Manning, or Roy Chubby Brown, as his detractors may have you believe. Instead, he displayed a masterful grasp of magic, a sharp, if twisted satirical edge, and most prominently a fantastic brain for comedy, showing his 15th best of all time ranking to be a well earned one. So I implore you, go and see him. Certainly be prepared for a fair bit of spikiness, but if you are, you’re in for an absolute riot of a night, with a true comedy legend at the helm.
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