Writer: Andrew Mapperley
Director: Belway Stanton
Andrew Mapperley sails close to the wind in this one-man comedy described on line as a sketch show. It starts innocently enough as, shouting like a TV evangelist, Mapperley proclaims that the internet was invented to save humanity as if we are back in the 1990s. But soon, influenced by the darker confines of the World Wide Web, Mapperley’s jokes veer too close to Unacceptable.
For instance, there’s a rape joke which may appear as if it’s more an attack on wokeness-gone-mad, but asking a random man in the audience if he is a rapist seems only for shock value. It certainly draws gasps from the crowd. Almost as uncomfortable is the skit where Mapperley plays a man dying from AIDS whose best friend is someone called Dorothy.
There are references to Madeleine McCann, too, so often the punchline of comedians nowadays such as Paul Chowdhry who delights in pushing boundaries. But Chowdhry is clever in his stand-up routines, exposing our own prejudices and internal racisms. Here, Mapperley’s reasons for being so coarse are unclear. At one point, he offers a tenner to a female audience member to go on stage to reveal her breasts and, when it seems that she is about to comply, he blames the rest of us for allowing it to happen.
There is one funny joke, however, about prolapses. It’s so funny that it should win an award and it makes up most of the one and a half stars below. But other scenes run on for far too long like the one where he uploads himself into the internet becoming a form of AI. A section where he becomes some kind of superhero who can detect the fetishes of others drags on forever and, while there’s some satisfaction to be had in his dry delivery, the jokes fall flat and the story peters out.
The end of the show is bleak as Mapperley explores something else that the internet has taught us and supplies some graphic visuals on the screen behind him. In a nice touch he finishes the show at the point where it began, but it’s a relief when it’s over. Perhaps all of us haven’t been entirely desensitised from the internet’s darkest recesses quite yet.
Reviewed on 5 February 2023
