Italian comic Giacinto Palmieri, in this hour of comedy, tries to draw comparisons between himself and renowned misogynist and philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche in their approach to us womenfolk as romantic prospects. The show was clunky and a little awkward at best, with many of the jokes falling flat. Palmieri, somewhat unforgivably, makes countless sexist comments, and remarks about what can only be described as domestic violence that go unelaborated. In the tiny room of the Free Sisters, the seven audience members had to sit through an uncomfortable hour listening to quite disturbing autobiographical comments from Palmieri.
Poorly structured, poorly delivered, making far too many audience assumptions, and frankly, just really creepy.
Palmieri began by illustrating Nietzsche’s own dry proposal to a woman he had barely met by getting an unsuspecting female audience member to read out an entire letter whilst he made very banal interjecting jokes, which were clunkily and awkwardly delivered. Palmieri went on to discuss his own “marriage-like” relationship of eight years, insulting the woman before telling us a story of him throwing her out of his (thankfully parked) car, failing to acknowledge the severity of the action, or implied violence. He treats this action as normal human behaviour, just as he fails to bat an eyelid when he recounts the tale of kicking his ex’s fridge in. This made for a lot of uncomfortable squirming and glancing around the audience, who thankfully didn’t share his rather warped sense of humour.
For someone with such disturbing stories and feeble material, Palmieri seemed ridiculously confident in his delivery. The jokes in the final section on “impossible women” fell very flat, and at many times over the hour, nobody but himself seemed amused by his material. For someone who has apparently “found himself” through comedy, the results are very poor: Palmieri doesn’t appear to be a particularly good comedian, and his storytelling shows a lack of understanding of his audience. He seemed very disconnected from the whole room, making far too many assumptions about the people there, in addition to accusing women on numerous occasions of being ”cockteases”.
Nietzsche, Women and I made foruncomfortable and distasteful viewing. Palmieri seems to have a lot of bottled up anger and resentment towards the women in his life, and uses this opportunity as a form of therapy session. I suppose a few questions have to be asked about someone who compares their love life to a man who died sad, mad and alone in an asylum.
Palmieri’s set was poorly structured, poorly delivered, making far too many audience assumptions, and frankly, just really creepy. As a woman, I would have felt incredibly uncomfortable had I attended alone.
