Hitting Funny Reviews

Oxford Daily Info

When I first saw a Volcano Theatre Company production, I left the theatre feeling invigorated and thought-provoked. It's now fourteen years later and I'm not disappointed by Hitting Funny, their most recent offering.

It's difficult at first to decide whether the production might just be stand-up, and (cf. Al Murray's 'The Pub Landlord' or Graham Fellows' 'John Shuttleworth') at times it's hard to remember that 'Chris Rich' is just like any other character on a stage.

Philip Ralph, the clever man behind this one-man show, left a nervous audience uncertain throughout. Uncertain as to when the show has started, uncertain as to when they should be laughing, uncertain of when they should stop laughing and uncertain as to when it all should end.

'Chris' is an angry man. He looks at the way society portrays humour in everything with 'things I don't understand' and then considers what we find funny and what we think is just taking it one step too far.

From one-liners ('A pork pie walks into a pub...') and simple sight gags (falling over on a banana skin) to the in-depth search for humour, Philip moved very quickly, linking one taboo subject to another. No topic was sacred, and politics, drugs and war were touched on ("if Al Khaeda is so secret, how do its members know who they are?"), along with - of course - sex ('Coprophilia. Who was the first person to try that?!'), the aim being to push the boundary of humour to the point of awkwardness, thus asking difficult questions that make us think very carefully about what we consider funny.

Hitting Funny is uncomfortable, tasteless, disgusting at times, challenging, powerful, funny and creative. Whilst I wouldn't recommend this production to the faint-hearted, this is a fantastic show which will leave anyone with a healthy open mind with a lot to think about.

Helen Williams, 24/03/06

Inside Comedy
Konrad Obiora, 6 April 2006

If only a few more stand-up comedians were as volatile and searingly funny as Chris Rich the fictional stand-up comedian in Philip Ralph’s blistering play Hitting Funny, currently playing at the Tristan Bates Theatre.

Chris Rich is in turmoil, on the one hand he wants to entertain his audience and make them laugh. But there is a side to his comic persona that is screaming to tell the audience how life really is, to show the audience the hypocrisy and lies that manifest themselves in the mass media, western culture and comedy.

At its basic level Hitting Funny is a condemnation of the comedians of the alternative comedy scene in the 1980s who criticised the establishment under the Conservative Party but later joined the establishment after New Labour came into power in 1997. The play is also a critique of modern social mores, the public’s insatiable appetite for mindless celebrity gossip, the tabloid newspapers’ role in pandering to that appetite, the attack on freedom of speech and expression.

Philip Ralph who also plays the role of Chris Rich was clearly influenced by the stand-up comedians Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks. These two comedians were not afraid to tackle serious social issues or challenge existing notions of what was offensive or obscene in their routines, regardless of whether it was funny or likely to offend the audience’s sensibilities.

Chris Rich starts his ‘show’ by performing some safe observational gags about the differences between men and women. He does a bit about women and clothing and explains how women decided that wearing thongs, cropped t-shirts, and tattoos on their backs that actually said “twat in Mandarin” was in keeping with the feminist cause.

The theme of sex and sexuality features heavily in Chris Rich’s set. He performs some truly inspired bits about masturbation at work and men's obsession with breasts. But as well as the jokes there is also an underlining criticism about the way sexuality is portrayed.

During the course of the play however, Chris Rich’s routine becomes increasingly darker as he starts talking about topics that are likely to leave some members of the audience feeling uncomfortable. There was for example a funny routine about coprophillia, which was both shocking in its content and superbly performed. At the end of the routine Chris Rich stops and asks the audience “did I go too far?”

There was also a bit about paedophilia, Chris Rich suggesting that as a punishment convicted paedophiles should dress up as clowns and drive in clown cars so that children could laugh at them.

Towards the end of the play Chris Rich is searching for truth in comedy and what his role as a stand-up comedian should be. Is it to tell safe, harmless jokes or is it to stand out from the myriad of bland observational comedians and challenge the audience to confront the harsh and at times brutal realities of life?

Hitting Funny is a hilarious and provocative play; at times it makes for uncomfortable watching. Philip Ralph’s energetic performance was riveting and enthralling. I particularly liked the way that Philip Ralph weaved two well-known routines by Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks into the script, which gave the play an added dimension and illustrated that addressing social issues in comedy could be funny.

The Scotsman
****

Philip Ralph's one-man performance as a comedian on the edge proves a dark, scathing and scatological treat.

From a distance of two decades, the phenomenon of "alternative comedy" seems almost quaint. The idea that young comedians, furious with the Thatcher regime, might somehow galvanise Britain's youth into activism looks tragically wan now. The more so in the fevered context of the Fringe, where most comedians seem focused on such heady goals as casual sex and a lucrative television deal.

On the face of it, Philip Ralph's angry one-man play - which he performs in the persona of comedian Chris Rich - is a critique of the "selling out" of stand-up comedy. These days, it suggests, stand-up is simply a strand of the Blairite consensus, too comfortable to risk the radicalism embraced by the likes of Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks.

It begins as a very funny pastiche of a contemporary stand-up routine called 'Things I Don't Understand'. The routine's central theme is sex; and it soon becomes clear that Ralph is taking issue with its prevalence in public life and the media: "Not sex you can have; sex you can look at".

But this is also a play steeped in pathological self-loathing. The ironically named Rich has come to recognize his own worthlessness. Yet the one thing that alleviates his self-disgust is a club full of laughing people, so the show must go on, and his bile must keep spilling out. Be warned: Ralph is articulating profound revulsion towards a culture that ignores harsh truths in favour of trivia, and it expresses itself in sexual and scatological material of escalating foulness.

As he veers towards breakdown, Rich distracts himself with a history of comedy, from an ape discovering the humorous possibilities of banana skins, via Jesus, Hitler and Hicks to the fluff-purveyors of today. Ralph doesn't stop there. His philosophical excavation digs ruthlessly deeper to explore what kind of conformity "selling in" might imply in the first place.

This is as dark and biting a dissection of comedy as you're likely to find at the Fringe; all the more disturbing for Ralph's desperado portrayal of a man tormented by his own reason for living.

Andrew Burnet

The Stage
17 Aug 2005

It is amazing how an audience develops preconceptions when presented with an easily identifiable character. In Hitting Funny, Philip Ralph is onstage in a suit, red shirt and trainers, mumbling reasonably witty observations into a mic. He looks like the stand-up comic his character Chris Rich is supposed to be.

The audience chuckles at what he is saying, responding to his appearance, but they are not really listening or attempting to read his body language. His delivery is intense, bitter and angry. When he lifts his head up to look at the audience, he has a threatening look.

Volcano's Hitting Funny is a physical and disturbing investigation into shattered dreams. In his raw, faultless performance, Ralph is angry that the political, anti-Thatcher, alternative comedians of the early eighties, whom he worshipped as a teenager, never changed a thing.

His anger is palpable, oozing from the stage as his character tackles, sex, paedophilia, the war on terror and all the other stock stand-up subjects. Sex is predominate. The West's obsession with sex and materialism at the expense of knowledge, intellect and social justice, have ushered in Al Qaeda and who can blame the terrorists for hating us, he asks.

Powerful, challenging, unmissable.

Jeremy Austin

Three Weeks
12 August 05
****

Philip Ralph is a wonderful performer. A mixture of sweat, guts and pure talent make this one-man show as entertaining as it is thought provoking. A stand up comic, Chris Rich, bombards us with his latest material, his current thoughts and a variety of seemingly random observations. The character seems to struggle to cope with the pressure of an audience, speeding between a variety of observations and comments, and pushing the boundaries of what humour is acceptable. But there is method in his madness, and intelligence behind the comedy. Sometimes filthy, often funny and sometimes simply uncomfortable, 'Hitting Funny' makes you see the art of comedy in a whole new light. A refreshingly thoughtful piece delivered with style and wit. [Ria Parry]

Rating 4/5

The List
11-18 August 05
****

A serious look at stand-up that's very funny

Under the guise of Chris Rich, a provocative, filthy comedian whose career is in nosedive, writer/performer and RADA-trained actor Philip Ralph doesn't so much deconstruct the art of stand-up as explode it. Ralph tests the very limits of funny, pushing routines beyond PC and and otherwise over the edge into... well, not at all funny. One skit in Rich's routine (which is titled Things I Don't Understand) begins with questions about the voyeuristic national male psyche, as evidenced in a display of various lads' mags, and ends up a dead end with an uncomfortable discussion about paedophiles.

Having provided examples of what's funny and what's not (in the observational, political and lavatorial modes), Ralph proceeds to perform (in mime, sort of) the evolution of comedy from ape to millennium man. That utterly demented routine is probably far funnier than much of what you'll see on the stand-up circuit in Edinburgh this month. If there's one criticism of Hitting Funny, it's that in the manic whirl of the show it's not always easy to catch Ralph's points. But the notion that what the we the audience of the consumer generation wants from comedy is to be merely entertained comes through loud and clear.

Miles Fielder

Metro
August 9, 2005
***

It's a very odd show, Hitting Funny - a quest for simple meaning in life dressed up as theatre and then pretending to be a stand-up show - but you kind of get the gist when the only character, who had apparently been soundchecking as we filed in, wraps himself around the mic for a full five minutes of bog-standard pier-end stand-up without once raising his eyes to the audience.

Of course, this isn't the real Chris Rich. Or rather, Chris Rich isn't even the real Chris Rich - he's the desperate jobbing stand-up through which the show conveys its ideas, the by turns pitiable, hateable and sage-like alter ego of the play's actor and writer Philip Ralph.

He softens us up with a few light gags to test the water, then barrels into purposefully uncomfortable routines about coprophilia and paedophilia. Is this meant to be funny? Rich doesn't know and that's what he keeps asking.

Riffing ferociously on the origin of comedy (a brilliant mime of a caveman slipping on a banana) and, again, musing with wilful disagreeability on Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler as history's greatest stand-ups, the answer doesn't come easily.

But in there somewhere is the faint hope that comedy can be a vehicle for positive thought, rather than society's light entertainment placebo.

David Pollock

The Western Mail
April 29, 2005

If there's a racing certainty about Volcano Theatre, it's that you can never be sure what will come next. The last show was a reality-tv influenced take on Romeo and Juliet, without the sub-plots and, indeed, without the romance, which some critics hated and most audiences loved. Now they have a one-man show about stand-up comedy, which I suspect most critics will love and some audiences at least will hate - at a recent gig there were 35 walk-outs.

To call Hitting Funny a show about stand-up comedy barely hints at what Philip Ralph achieves in 75 minutes or so of non-stop monologue. Basically it's a lament for the power of the comic as political subversive - but that's just for starters. On the surface it's an aggressive, offensive comedy turn that leaves few stones unturned in its attempt to shock and make you laugh, initially like early Ben Elton on speed or a quick-fire foul-mouthed Jeremy Hardy lacking any redeeming qualities of likeability or ideological commitment.

But that is Chris Rich, the man who greets us as we take our seats, mumbling head-down wearing a red nose, a man who rants about pornography, the carnal weakness of men and the unsexiness of female tattoos, piercings, fat midriffs and thongs. Or rather, it's the on-stage persona of comedian Chris Rich, while Chris Rich is the character created by actor Philip Ralph (and that's probably an alias anyway)…

Confused ? Well, while there may seem to have been little consistency to Volcano shows there is one common concern: identity, the question of where the performer stops and the character takes over, and whether what you see is what you get - the manifestations of what's called the postmodern condition - and Hitting Funny explores just that.

Well, to an extent. What it is more concerned with is the role of comedy (another ongoing Volcano issue) in an age where Marx's old adage about history repeating itself first as tragedy and then as farce appeals to many a left-leaning performer. Philip Ralph here invokes the spirits of the likes of Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks, those controversial American stand-ups who changed the face of comedy by outraging audiences.

What Ralph does is confuse, confront and confound us as to whether what he (as Chris Rich or as Rich's performing alter-ego) is doing is for real or pastiche as his jokes get ever more extreme, questioning just where we draw the line - in this case, it's just after coprophilia, with a torrent of graphic descriptions that simultaneously repulse and make you laugh (maybe), the climax of an exhausting line on the bizarre nature of human sexuality.

Nothing is sacred. Christianity, terrorism, paedophilia, auto-eroticism, all are used as subjects for comedy, and we have to ask whether we laugh because it actually is funny or because a taboo subject treated with irreverence makes us laugh. Underlying all this is the ultimate conundrum: what is the relation between comedy and politics and is the lack of a latter-day Lenny Bruce another sign that we have lost the battle against hegemonic conformity ? Have we, like stand-up comics, sold out or bought in ?

Ralph asks uncomfortable, difficult questions in a play (and, we have to remind ourselves, that's what it is) that is intelligent, startling and one of the best things Volcano has produced. His performance, under Paul Davies's direction, is superb as he manages to be both a wildly anarchically funny stand-up comic and offer a critique of contemporary comedy. Brilliant.

David Adams

		Reviews

*Oxford Daily Info* When I first saw a Volcano Theatre Company production, I left the theatre feeling invigorated and thought-provoked. It's now fourteen years later and I'm not disappointed by Hitting Funny, their most recent offering. It's difficult at first to decide whether the production might just be stand-up, and (cf. Al Murray's 'The Pub Landlord' or Graham Fellows' 'John Shuttleworth') at times it's hard to remember that 'Chris Rich' is just like any other character on a stage. Philip Ralph, the clever man behind this one-man show, left a nervous audience uncertain throughout. Uncertain as to when the show has started, uncertain as to when they should be laughing, uncertain of when they should stop laughing and uncertain as to when it all should end. 'Chris' is an angry man. He looks at the way society portrays humour in everything with 'things I don't understand' and then considers what we find funny and what we think is just taking it one step too far. From one-liners ('A pork pie walks into a pub...') and simple sight gags (falling over on a banana skin) to the in-depth search for humour, Philip moved very quickly, linking one taboo subject to another. No topic was sacred, and politics, drugs and war were touched on ("if Al Khaeda is so secret, how do its members know who they are?"), along with - of course - sex ('Coprophilia. Who was the first person to try that?!'), the aim being to push the boundary of humour to the point of awkwardness, thus asking difficult questions that make us think very carefully about what we consider funny. Hitting Funny is uncomfortable, tasteless, disgusting at times, challenging, powerful, funny and creative. Whilst I wouldn't recommend this production to the faint-hearted, this is a fantastic show which will leave anyone with a healthy open mind with a lot to think about. Helen Williams, 24/03/06 *Inside Comedy* Konrad Obiora, 6 April 2006 If only a few more stand-up comedians were as volatile and searingly funny as Chris Rich the fictional stand-up comedian in Philip Ralph’s blistering play Hitting Funny, currently playing at the Tristan Bates Theatre. Chris Rich is in turmoil, on the one hand he wants to entertain his audience and make them laugh. But there is a side to his comic persona that is screaming to tell the audience how life really is, to show the audience the hypocrisy and lies that manifest themselves in the mass media, western culture and comedy. At its basic level Hitting Funny is a condemnation of the comedians of the alternative comedy scene in the 1980s who criticised the establishment under the Conservative Party but later joined the establishment after New Labour came into power in 1997. The play is also a critique of modern social mores, the public’s insatiable appetite for mindless celebrity gossip, the tabloid newspapers’ role in pandering to that appetite, the attack on freedom of speech and expression. Philip Ralph who also plays the role of Chris Rich was clearly influenced by the stand-up comedians Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks. These two comedians were not afraid to tackle serious social issues or challenge existing notions of what was offensive or obscene in their routines, regardless of whether it was funny or likely to offend the audience’s sensibilities. Chris Rich starts his ‘show’ by performing some safe observational gags about the differences between men and women. He does a bit about women and clothing and explains how women decided that wearing thongs, cropped t-shirts, and tattoos on their backs that actually said “twat in Mandarin” was in keeping with the feminist cause. The theme of sex and sexuality features heavily in Chris Rich’s set. He performs some truly inspired bits about masturbation at work and men's obsession with breasts. But as well as the jokes there is also an underlining criticism about the way sexuality is portrayed. During the course of the play however, Chris Rich’s routine becomes increasingly darker as he starts talking about topics that are likely to leave some members of the audience feeling uncomfortable. There was for example a funny routine about coprophillia, which was both shocking in its content and superbly performed. At the end of the routine Chris Rich stops and asks the audience “did I go too far?” There was also a bit about paedophilia, Chris Rich suggesting that as a punishment convicted paedophiles should dress up as clowns and drive in clown cars so that children could laugh at them. Towards the end of the play Chris Rich is searching for truth in comedy and what his role as a stand-up comedian should be. Is it to tell safe, harmless jokes or is it to stand out from the myriad of bland observational comedians and challenge the audience to confront the harsh and at times brutal realities of life? Hitting Funny is a hilarious and provocative play; at times it makes for uncomfortable watching. Philip Ralph’s energetic performance was riveting and enthralling. I particularly liked the way that Philip Ralph weaved two well-known routines by Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks into the script, which gave the play an added dimension and illustrated that addressing social issues in comedy could be funny. The Scotsman ****** Philip Ralph's one-man performance as a comedian on the edge proves a dark, scathing and scatological treat. From a distance of two decades, the phenomenon of "alternative comedy" seems almost quaint. The idea that young comedians, furious with the Thatcher regime, might somehow galvanise Britain's youth into activism looks tragically wan now. The more so in the fevered context of the Fringe, where most comedians seem focused on such heady goals as casual sex and a lucrative television deal. On the face of it, Philip Ralph's angry one-man play - which he performs in the persona of comedian Chris Rich - is a critique of the "selling out" of stand-up comedy. These days, it suggests, stand-up is simply a strand of the Blairite consensus, too comfortable to risk the radicalism embraced by the likes of Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks. It begins as a very funny pastiche of a contemporary stand-up routine called 'Things I Don't Understand'. The routine's central theme is sex; and it soon becomes clear that Ralph is taking issue with its prevalence in public life and the media: "Not sex you can have; sex you can look at". But this is also a play steeped in pathological self-loathing. The ironically named Rich has come to recognize his own worthlessness. Yet the one thing that alleviates his self-disgust is a club full of laughing people, so the show must go on, and his bile must keep spilling out. Be warned: Ralph is articulating profound revulsion towards a culture that ignores harsh truths in favour of trivia, and it expresses itself in sexual and scatological material of escalating foulness. As he veers towards breakdown, Rich distracts himself with a history of comedy, from an ape discovering the humorous possibilities of banana skins, via Jesus, Hitler and Hicks to the fluff-purveyors of today. Ralph doesn't stop there. His philosophical excavation digs ruthlessly deeper to explore what kind of conformity "selling in" might imply in the first place. This is as dark and biting a dissection of comedy as you're likely to find at the Fringe; all the more disturbing for Ralph's desperado portrayal of a man tormented by his own reason for living. Andrew Burnet The Stage 17 Aug 2005 It is amazing how an audience develops preconceptions when presented with an easily identifiable character. In Hitting Funny, Philip Ralph is onstage in a suit, red shirt and trainers, mumbling reasonably witty observations into a mic. He looks like the stand-up comic his character Chris Rich is supposed to be. The audience chuckles at what he is saying, responding to his appearance, but they are not really listening or attempting to read his body language. His delivery is intense, bitter and angry. When he lifts his head up to look at the audience, he has a threatening look. Volcano's Hitting Funny is a physical and disturbing investigation into shattered dreams. In his raw, faultless performance, Ralph is angry that the political, anti-Thatcher, alternative comedians of the early eighties, whom he worshipped as a teenager, never changed a thing. His anger is palpable, oozing from the stage as his character tackles, sex, paedophilia, the war on terror and all the other stock stand-up subjects. Sex is predominate. The West's obsession with sex and materialism at the expense of knowledge, intellect and social justice, have ushered in Al Qaeda and who can blame the terrorists for hating us, he asks. Powerful, challenging, unmissable. Jeremy Austin** Three Weeks 12 August 05 ** Philip Ralph is a wonderful performer. A mixture of sweat, guts and pure talent make this one-man show as entertaining as it is thought provoking. A stand up comic, Chris Rich, bombards us with his latest material, his current thoughts and a variety of seemingly random observations. The character seems to struggle to cope with the pressure of an audience, speeding between a variety of observations and comments, and pushing the boundaries of what humour is acceptable. But there is method in his madness, and intelligence behind the comedy. Sometimes filthy, often funny and sometimes simply uncomfortable, 'Hitting Funny' makes you see the art of comedy in a whole new light. A refreshingly thoughtful piece delivered with style and wit. [Ria Parry] Rating 4/5** The List 11-18 August 05 ******** A serious look at stand-up that's very funny Under the guise of Chris Rich, a provocative, filthy comedian whose career is in nosedive, writer/performer and RADA-trained actor Philip Ralph doesn't so much deconstruct the art of stand-up as explode it. Ralph tests the very limits of funny, pushing routines beyond PC and and otherwise over the edge into... well, not at all funny. One skit in Rich's routine (which is titled Things I Don't Understand) begins with questions about the voyeuristic national male psyche, as evidenced in a display of various lads' mags, and ends up a dead end with an uncomfortable discussion about paedophiles. Having provided examples of what's funny and what's not (in the observational, political and lavatorial modes), Ralph proceeds to perform (in mime, sort of) the evolution of comedy from ape to millennium man. That utterly demented routine is probably far funnier than much of what you'll see on the stand-up circuit in Edinburgh this month. If there's one criticism of Hitting Funny, it's that in the manic whirl of the show it's not always easy to catch Ralph's points. But the notion that what the we the audience of the consumer generation wants from comedy is to be merely entertained comes through loud and clear. Miles Fielder Metro August 9, 2005 *** It's a very odd show, Hitting Funny - a quest for simple meaning in life dressed up as theatre and then pretending to be a stand-up show - but you kind of get the gist when the only character, who had apparently been soundchecking as we filed in, wraps himself around the mic for a full five minutes of bog-standard pier-end stand-up without once raising his eyes to the audience. Of course, this isn't the real Chris Rich. Or rather, Chris Rich isn't even the real Chris Rich - he's the desperate jobbing stand-up through which the show conveys its ideas, the by turns pitiable, hateable and sage-like alter ego of the play's actor and writer Philip Ralph. He softens us up with a few light gags to test the water, then barrels into purposefully uncomfortable routines about coprophilia and paedophilia. Is this meant to be funny? Rich doesn't know and that's what he keeps asking. Riffing ferociously on the origin of comedy (a brilliant mime of a caveman slipping on a banana) and, again, musing with wilful disagreeability on Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler as history's greatest stand-ups, the answer doesn't come easily. But in there somewhere is the faint hope that comedy can be a vehicle for positive thought, rather than society's light entertainment placebo. David Pollock The Western Mail April 29, 2005 If there's a racing certainty about Volcano Theatre, it's that you can never be sure what will come next. The last show was a reality-tv influenced take on Romeo and Juliet, without the sub-plots and, indeed, without the romance, which some critics hated and most audiences loved. Now they have a one-man show about stand-up comedy, which I suspect most critics will love and some audiences at least will hate - at a recent gig there were 35 walk-outs. To call Hitting Funny a show about stand-up comedy barely hints at what Philip Ralph achieves in 75 minutes or so of non-stop monologue. Basically it's a lament for the power of the comic as political subversive - but that's just for starters. On the surface it's an aggressive, offensive comedy turn that leaves few stones unturned in its attempt to shock and make you laugh, initially like early Ben Elton on speed or a quick-fire foul-mouthed Jeremy Hardy lacking any redeeming qualities of likeability or ideological commitment. But that is Chris Rich, the man who greets us as we take our seats, mumbling head-down wearing a red nose, a man who rants about pornography, the carnal weakness of men and the unsexiness of female tattoos, piercings, fat midriffs and thongs. Or rather, it's the on-stage persona of comedian Chris Rich, while Chris Rich is the character created by actor Philip Ralph (and that's probably an alias anyway)… Confused ? Well, while there may seem to have been little consistency to Volcano shows there is one common concern: identity, the question of where the performer stops and the character takes over, and whether what you see is what you get - the manifestations of what's called the postmodern condition - and Hitting Funny explores just that. Well, to an extent. What it is more concerned with is the role of comedy (another ongoing Volcano issue) in an age where Marx's old adage about history repeating itself first as tragedy and then as farce appeals to many a left-leaning performer. Philip Ralph here invokes the spirits of the likes of Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks, those controversial American stand-ups who changed the face of comedy by outraging audiences. What Ralph does is confuse, confront and confound us as to whether what he (as Chris Rich or as Rich's performing alter-ego) is doing is for real or pastiche as his jokes get ever more extreme, questioning just where we draw the line - in this case, it's just after coprophilia, with a torrent of graphic descriptions that simultaneously repulse and make you laugh (maybe), the climax of an exhausting line on the bizarre nature of human sexuality. Nothing is sacred. Christianity, terrorism, paedophilia, auto-eroticism, all are used as subjects for comedy, and we have to ask whether we laugh because it actually is funny or because a taboo subject treated with irreverence makes us laugh. Underlying all this is the ultimate conundrum: what is the relation between comedy and politics and is the lack of a latter-day Lenny Bruce another sign that we have lost the battle against hegemonic conformity ? Have we, like stand-up comics, sold out or bought in ? Ralph asks uncomfortable, difficult questions in a play (and, we have to remind ourselves, that's what it is) that is intelligent, startling and one of the best things Volcano has produced. His performance, under Paul Davies's direction, is superb as he manages to be both a wildly anarchically funny stand-up comic and offer a critique of contemporary comedy. Brilliant. David Adams

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