This is Guy Williams’ third show in Edinburgh, and if you liked the first two, you will like this one. It’s more stuff along the Guy Williams line: shouty, angry, taking on the right-wing edgelords by trying to find left-wing things that are so extreme they might even offend the socialists who go to arts festivals.
This year, he’s done that even more intentionally than in previous years, making the theme of his show that we need to find ways to reach the right-wingers in ways they understand. And not by the often-repeated centrist idea that we should compromise our beliefs to be closer to theirs. We should do this, Williams says, by being just as horrible as they are, with our own beliefs. When they go low, we meet them on the low road and have a pub fight.
The concept is pretty much a distillation of what Guy Williams has been advocating for most of his career, but put into clearer words than usual this year. Williams practices what he preaches; his stand-up person is both extremely left-wing and extremely brash, so no one can accuse him of claiming to be edgy but failing to deliver, as many other comedians have done.
If you struggle with a love for the harsh and aggressive that doesn’t seem to fit with your left-wing values, then Guy Williams is the perfect comedian for you. If you don’t, then… well, he may not be, and that admittedly makes his appeal somewhat niche. But for the people he appeals to (and I must declare a bias by saying I’m one of them), there’s an overwhelming catharsis in his shouty, angry stand-up.
This is not the rigorous anger of a Bill Hicks, or the well-researched anger of a Nish Kumar (Guy Williams does know what he talking about – less than an actual journalist but more than your average comedian – as evidenced by his other work, but he keeps that under wraps in his stand-up, lest he betray his persona that is, in his words, a “dumb cunt”). This is a pointless, screaming into the void anger that gets directed wildly at everything in his radius, about 70% of which truly deserves it. It’s a self-deprecating anger, a frustrated anger.
Williams, like his fellow socialist Josie Long in her latest show, has discovered the charm of forgoing a polished PowerPoint presentation to display some images on giant cards, and hold them up for the audience to see. He has props, he has plot-relevant clothes, he has a fun gimmick ending, he has some relatively local material (if you come from New Zealand, then Oxford is local to Edinburgh). He also has some repeated jokes from last year, and even the year before. But the enthusiastic way he performs it can make it feel less like recycling material than like playing the hits.