Denis Krasnov: Fringe 2012
Live Review
Just The Tonic at The Caves

The best joke of this show is not even in it. On the official edfringe.com website, Denis Krasnov has smuggled past censors  who are usually so sensitive that they have to ban the word ‘cock, the audience warning: ‘No stupid cunts allowed’.

Expect that to vanish soon after this review appears…

Unfortunately the show itself, despite its billing, is neither intellectual or particularly filthy. Or funny.

The intellect seems to be covered by a garbled bit of quantum physics read, but barely understood, from the pages of Wikipedia. But no worries, it just leads – with no logic whatsoever – to a dick joke. As just about everything he says does. If that’s a definition of ‘filth’, then yes, he peddles it, but the word suggests an edginess he doesn’t have.

This Russian-American is not comedically clever enough, nor even offensive enough, to make these cheap jokes work. Nonetheless he wrings them out over extended routines that go nowhere.

He does about five minutes on men not being able to say for sure that they are not gay unless they had sucked every dick on the planet and didn’t like any one of them.

Reducing gay men  down to dick-suckers, as if that encompasses their whole being, is a lazy shorthand that many a comic falls into. But some of them at least have the grace to be original, funny or provocative about it… Krasnov’s so provocative that a man in my row dozed through the whole show – not just drifted off for a moment in a hot, late room, but  proper slumber.

‘My job as a comedian is to expose lies,’ he says pretentiously after 40 minutes of telling us how the Da Vinci Code is ‘all about the pussy’, imagining swimming inside a vagina, and telling us about sticking eggs up his arse. The paedo gags he saves for later. ‘Having a Ferris wheel does not make you a paedophile,’ he says, ‘Fucking a kid in the ass does.’ What insight.

There’s some suggestion that if he ditched this uninventive path, he might have some good first-hand tales. if only he would actually bring himself tell them.

His story about how he once found himself sleeping with a ‘chick with a dick’ could, if true, be made funny, self-effacing and personal. Instead he just revels in the image alone, without conveying any sense of reality. Likewise he mentions in passing that he was once in jail… but it’s just for a ‘dropping the soap in the showers’ joke in which – twist alert – he wanted to be raped.

It’s an hour of toilet-wall graffiti comedy which isn’t for the easily offended. Or for those seeking laughs.