Lewis Schaffer’s schtick is that he is an ex New York Jew making his way in this strange foreign land and hating every minute of it. His loathing is as boundless as the ocean and encompasses women, black people, Jews, Scots, English - if it can be described as a demographic then it is ripe for the picking on from this vitriolic shambolic comic.
Schaffer begins his set by describing how various reviews have given him one star - and then he proceeds to show us why. He looks sharp - in a dark suit and shiny shoes, welcoming people into the venue like some creepy avuncular car salesman - but he is spiky, not astute. His mic technique is poor, his voice muffled as he waffles into the microphone. His thoughts are an incoherent stream; the occasional vulgar one liner is thrown into a whirlpool of unconnected abuse. At one point he asked a man whose friends attended last year how they had described his act. ‘Rambling, vulgar’ was the reply. It is pretty apt.
He kept on checking the time to see how long the set had been. ‘It’s slow’ said one punter in the front row, perhaps trying to make the ordeal end sooner. The whole piece is muddled and awkward.
Schaffer has made it clear that making people uncomfortable is his thing and his material seems to divide the crowd. He declares at the outset that the young women in the audience are not his target demographic, so jokes about women being ‘stupid f--king c--ts’ are lost on me due to the inadequacies of my gender, I suppose. However, while some are sniggering, the young men who came with me are not laughing. The problem isn’t that he’s reductive and vulgar, the problem is that he’s unoriginal and unfunny.
