As if we didn’t know to expect old-fashioned from Bobby Davro, the three shows preceding his, in his niche fringe venue, are tributes to Elvis, Sinatra and Roy Orbison. His show is called Everything Is Funny … If You Can Laugh at It: no one can accuse Davro of false advertising. And yet, and yet – it’s always intriguing when these end-of-the-pier comics tip up to try their hand at the fringe, as Jim Davidson, Michael Barrymore, Jim Bowen and others have in recent years. Will they trim their sails to suit the festival wind? Or ply the same unreconstructed gags, and to hell with the context?
Reader, Bobby Davro takes the latter route. Not that he doesn’t take context into account, mind you: he opens with a performance of Scotland’s de facto national anthem, I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) by the Proclaimers, inviting us all to sing “Bobby Davro” instead of “da-da da da”. Could there be a better opening to a comedy show? But with the welcome currents of modern comedy away from old-school sexism and racism, Davro makes no compromise – save for the trigger warning he issues at the start, telling snowflakes to stay away.
That makes the 65-year-old (who had a stroke in January) sound more obnoxious than he is. He doesn’t present here as one of your shoot-from-the-hip comics, heroically saying the unsayable and putting the marginalised back in their boxes. He comes across, on the contrary, as a convivial entertainer with a gift for making (some) people feel welcomed and at ease, even as he’s teasing them to their faces about their looks, their gender – and yes, their race, too. Would you believe that practically his first action onstage is to introduce the venue’s black security guard (one of few people of colour in the room) then make a joke about the size of the man’s penis? I was stunned – by both the blatant racism, but also the clapped-out stereotype.
Davro has a seaside-postcard gender sensibility (“How many women, by a show of tits, think I’m sexist?”), performs an impression of Stephen Hawking at which Donald Trump might blush, and cracks gags about trans people and dog-eating east Asians, too. In short: the Edinburgh comedy awards panel are likely to be looking elsewhere.
The sad thing about all this is that, behind all those tired, sometimes shocking jibes, Davro the standup has some redeeming features. There are plenty of amusing (if groansome) one-liners, expertly delivered. OK, so you might guess some of these routines pre-date decimalisation (in fact, he’s the same age as Ben Elton): the one where he lip-syncs to a wonky recording of Ol’ Blue Eyes; the Julio Iglesias parody apologising to all the girls he’s infected with STIs. As per Butlin’s tradition, Davro’s show is as much song as standup, and there’s plenty of knockabout audience involvement, as three punters join him onstage for an Elvis Presley singalong.
Davro is good at this stuff; he seems to enjoy laughing with, more than at, people. I’m sure he thinks his jokes, even (or especially) the derogatory ones, are bringing people together, not dividing them. He’s got a song here, If You’ve Been Offended By Me (a twist on Randy Newman’s You’ve Got a Friend in Me), that advances that argument. But, if only in an Edinburgh fringe context, he feels like an outnumbered clown-that-time-forgot here, a part-likable, part-dispiriting reminder of all-in working men’s club conviviality, where the price of admission was a preparedness to be mocked for your divergence from the norm.