‘Give me a cheer if you’ve ever experienced remorse!” So begins Alfie Brown’s new show, and if you’ve got any cheerful cheers to cheer, get them out of the way now. Cheer will henceforth be in modest supply. Open Hearted Human Enquiry is about Brown’s 2023 “cancellation” (apply or delete scare quotes according to taste), after old footage was excavated of him using the N-word on stage while seeking to make a progressive point about racism. Brown is a comic who makes “woke jokes”, he says, “in a non-woke way”. The blowback has had a significant negative impact, emotionally and professionally. This show is his reckoning with the experience.
Is it a mea culpa? Partly. Is Brown donning a hairshirt? He is not. He is, for good or ill, the most bloody-minded of comics, incapable of merely saying the thing that might smooth his way back into favour. He offers a heartfelt “sorry” here, but also meditates on what that sorry signifies. He clearly regrets the ill-judged routine but also accuses others of bad faith in their reaction to it.
Sounds like a hoot, amirite? It isn’t. The blows are still raining down on Brown, and they include the death of his friend and director, Adam Brace, in April and, as the show belatedly turns to address, the death of his dad, the musical comic Steve Brown, in February. Alfie’s critics – and there have been many – may see the public airing of all that as fishing for sympathy. Even his defenders might think it too much woe for a comedy show to bear.
But it is a measure of the 37-year-old’s craft, and of what I perceive to be the good faith of his engagement with the questions raised, that this hour is totally compelling. It is often darkly funny – as when Brown deconstructs the idea that “you’re only apologising because you got caught”, or questions his mum’s intonation when she asks if he has considered suicide. There is also a depressed family trip to Center Parcs, and a spirited defence of nepo babies, historical and otherwise. This story from inside the belly of the backlash is well told and worth hearing.
• At Just the Tonic at the Caves, Edinburgh, until 25 August
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