Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Jamie MacDonald's recent shows have tended to be variations on the theme that just because he's blind, this doesn't preclude him from behaving badly. And certainly he's testy enough, though arguably justifiably so, with the outrageous amount of soundbleed from the show in the room next door to his, which sounds for all the world like a First World War trench drama.

This plays into his opening conceit though, that if straight, white men haven't been cancelled en masse, they've at least taken their eyes off the ball and are now portrayed as the villains causing every ill in modern society. Fair enough, no great murmurs of dissent from MacDonald or anyone else.

Of course, MacDonald has still got the ‘loophole’ of his disability to set him apart from the toxic manosphere. But what if I want to be toxic he opines, his recent appearance on Celebrity Masterchef both a flex for an act attracting ever-more broadcast work, and topical as well, as he huffs that he never got to hear anything controversial during his stint on the under-fire cookery programme.

Unquestionably, he takes the piss in pretending his dog is a guide dog when it suits him, with a glimmer of admiration for the hospitality staff who call his bluff over the non-compliant animal.

But there are two aspects that perhaps drive Toxic Bastard further than his previous hours on his preoccupation. Firstly, on the allowances that others make for him, he's acquiring a darker, harder edge, wondering how much more of a wrong'un he could be if he exploited the licence afforded him.

Not for a second do you assume that there are real skeletons in his closet. And yet he skilfully and a little daringly lets the possibility hang in the air. After all, Masterchef would still have been widely perceived as a family-friendly show by most not so long ago.

Also, more so than in previous hours I reckon, he bristles with genuine anger at the treatment of disabled people in recent memory, specifically the 1990s. Airports were the worst. He recounts in excruciating detail one experience where the customer service was anything but and he was treated as an almighty inconvenience, disrupting a workplace romance on company hours. 

If there has been some over-correction in the rights and respect bestowed upon him and other disabled people, well it unquestionably seems hard-earned.

Peevish with the patronising and critical of the RNIB, he affords short shrift to his friend's suggestion that they should establish a disabled equivalent of Pride marches, the logistical difficulties prompting him to wickedly funny imaginings of the event going disastrously wrong.

Representation is all very well. But he wants it on his terms. The comic was very much in on the joke as he was left to his own devices during the visual rounds on Have I Got News For You. But that didn't stop condescending viewers denying him his agency, overlooking his comic intentions in their tokenism.

Sharing the everyday, micro-insensitivities from others that make his life just that little bit unnecessarily harder, it's these, rather than outright idiocy or even bigotry, and the comic head of steam that he can build from them, that truly warrant him dipping his toe into toxic bastardy.

Review date: 22 Aug 2025
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Reviewed at: Gilded Balloon Patter House