When at least half the audience refuse to clap at the end of a comedy show and then gather in groups outside to discuss how they hated it you can say one of two things about the show. Either it was of such iconoclastic brilliance that it is wholly misunderstood or else there is something very wrong with it. After events as described above I’ve thought long and hard about which category “Fat Whore” falls into and it is the latter.
Comedian Kristine Levine, the self-titled “fat whore”- all her family are fat whores she tells us- presents a comedy show like no other. Her autobiographical routine focuses largely on her 13 years working as a shop assistant in a porn store in her native Portland, Oregon during which time she dealt with a range of clients, including the crazy, the junkie and the dead.
She tells stories of such a gross-out sexual explicitness they make Frankie Boyle look like he should be on Jackanory. They won’t be to everyone’s taste, indeed they may not be to most people’s but the greater problem is that they’re just not funny. We sat through anecdotes about oral sex and the state of her vagina waiting for the punchline; it never came. This is not comedy so much as dirty talk.
It is not prudish nor oversensitive to find jokes which place the blame for rape upon the victim highly offensive. Levine’s routine is littered with such jokes. As she summed it up herself, if you don’t want to get raped “don’t get drunk where strangers can f*** you”. She mocked the British laws which state that inebriation can negate consent to sexual activity and suggested that any woman who got drunk at a man’s house and then awoke to find that he had had anal sex with her while she was unconscious should “walk it off”. It was not rape, it was “a fun Tuesday”. She threw in various other witticisms to the effect that paedophiles only abuse pretty children and took great pleasure in telling how she had divorced her unfaithful husband while he was in a psychiatric ward after a suicide attempt.
I really wanted to like Kristine Levine. She’s a bold female comedian in a festival where that is all too rare. She’s confident in her body and has survived and come out triumphant from what has clearly been a challenging life. Unfortunately, liking her is impossible. Her crude material will be distressing to many and simply isn’t funny.
