Eastern Europe has barely been represented at the Fringe, with only a handful of stand-ups and a few classical stagings, mainly from Poland and the Czech Republic, making their way to Scotland this year. That is why Evaldas Karosas’ solo work A Very Capable Man was screaming for attention. And attention it got, in an almost packed basement at the Cabaret Voltaire, a famous stand-up venue that could hardly have been more fitting for the Lithuanian host’s irreverent and sometimes deeply iconoclastic humour.
There is only one problem with this kind of humour: it can be borderline sexist. At times, Karosas seems to anticipate the objection himself, rationalising his jokes through the cultural and material conditions he describes – “before we can have gay rights in my village, we need a paved road” – but that doesn’t make every stereotype sit comfortably. The pointed distinction between the way women and men supposedly consume pornography, for instance, is funny precisely because it is blunt, but also revealing of the cultural baggage that comes with it. However allegedly grounded such stereotypes may be, they sound out of place when transplanted into today’s world of hard-earned minority and gender rights.
And yet this discomfort is also part of what makes Karosas interesting. Because this is not crude humour in any straightforward sense. Leave aside the self-sucking jokes and the more deliberately offensive material, and what emerges is an intellectually curious comedian who can spend several minutes discussing the difference between correct and colloquial English grammar, including the rather amusing observation that immigrants sometimes have a better instinct for grammatical correctness than native speakers. As an immigrant myself, I can vouch for that.
In fact, Karosas is the least controversial (and most in the right) when he draws on his own poor immigrant background to shine a much-needed light on the rich-poor divide that still defines Europe. If some Eastern Europeans retain cruder – let’s say it – more backward attitudes and behaviours, Western Europeans are hardly innocent when it comes to understanding the region’s history, culture and material conditions. And while Karosas could do even more to expose the ignorance that exists on both sides of this divide, making this gap the subject of his comedy, demonstrates more intelligence than his more provocative jokes might initially suggest.
And this, ultimately, is where A Very Capable Man becomes more complicated than a collection of politically incorrect jokes. Karosas clearly has a knack for stand-up, but there are moments when his material seems caught between inherited stereotypes and the sharper, more self-aware comedian he is capable of becoming. One hopes that, as he develops, he will retain the irreverence while interrogating some of the assumptions behind it. Following that thought, maybe wall-punching aggressiveness could be transformed into as effectively good humor as discussing the cultural divide between the East and the West.
The strange thing is that, truth be told, compared to the milder, more politically correct comedy that surrounds it, Karosas’ jokes, style and delivery are simply funnier. The audience clearly thought so: waves of laughter swept through the basement throughout the performance, repeatedly and almost involuntarily. And that is perhaps the real achievement of Evaldas Karosas: A Very Capable Man: it manages to make you laugh at ideas you might otherwise reject, while leaving you to decide exactly where the joke ends and the uncomfortable truth begins. For me, it was one of the best stand-up performances I’ve seen at the Fringe – or, frankly, anywhere else – in recent memory.
Runs until August 30 2026 | Image: Contributed
