TIMES change. What was acceptable in the eighties (and nineties and maybe even into the noughties) isn’t in 2023. Our language, our attitudes, our beliefs are constantly in a state of flux. We are not the same as we were. Be kind is the watchword.
So where does that leave a comedian like Tom Stade who has spent his comic career extolling the virtues of sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll? Has he had to readjust or recalibrate his approach? Has he reined in his act? Has he, in short, turned things down a bit?
Has he XXXX (You can supply the expletive yourself, though, even if you do it won’t be as hardcore as the one Stade would supply).
As Natural Born Killer proves, Stade remains a comedian who will say the unsayable. Shout it, in fact. Which means you will be laughing whilst sometimes unsure if you should be.
To be clear, there will be people who will find – have always found – Stade strong meat. And in this show he takes delight in having a dig at the politically correct policing of language which is guaranteed to offend someone.
But there is never a sense in any of this that he’s punching down, aiming at easy targets.
In fact, there is a sophistication beneath the savagery. Natural Born Killer riffs on age and how it conditions attitudes. He has fun bouncing between the outlooks of boomers, millennials and Gen Zs and the point we all get to in our lives where the world is moving faster than we are and we can’t keep up.
And, yes, he goes over the top of the top to reinforce his points sometimes. After one particular routine about school shootings – yes, he goes there – he tells us he has another joke about that subject which goes even further. Do we want to hear it, he asks? He tells us anyway, and, yes, it goes much, much further.
But it is also a brilliant comic inversion of the real-life horror that inspired it, one that reminds us that the real world is much more brutal and shocking than anything said on stage at the Fringe on a Saturday night.
“I’m trying to be a better person,” Stade says at one point in the evening. Maybe he’s not trying as hard as he could be. Maybe we’re lucky that’s the case.
Tom Stade: Natural Born Killer, The Stand Comedy Club (Stand 1), 8.30pm until August 27 (except August 14)
