Daniel Sloss, as he is happy to admit, is only a part-timer at this year’s Fringe. Just a couple of dates, but when you’re filling out the Edinburgh Playhouse (“the largest seated theatre in the UK” the Fringe entry tells us) each time maybe that’s all you need.
Sloss calls himself a “Z list” Scottish celebrity this evening, but it’s fair to say he has probably moved beyond the need to do a full Edinburgh run these days. He sets off on a tour of Europe next month with Bitter. It’s been a show that he’s been touring for a while, though tonight we have the added bonus of having Catherine King signing at the side of the stage (she’s been signing for him since his second show). As a result, the audience now know how to sign the words for the worst swear words in BSL.
Sloss is, it’s fair to say, a Marmite comedian. There are those who see his outrageous self-confidence as arrogance, the bulletproof certainty of his opinions – the kind of certainty you normally only get in teenagers and newspaper columnists – a sign of self-regard, as is the wilful need to be provocative, to keep saying the unsayable, again and again.
Sloss is certainly not lacking in self-belief – it’s part of the attraction for his audience – but there’s more going on here than mere self-indulgence.
The provocation is a form of play. It’s Sloss seeing where the line is, stepping over it, then pointing out why, in fact, he hasn’t by deconstructing what he’s just done and then stepping over the line anyway. His pleasure in the technicalities of comedy, in exploiting its hot-button possibilities is high-end performance.
That said, in some ways you could cast Bitter as a holding operation. It sees him circle back to a couple of his previous concerns: break-ups (the subject of his 2018 Netflix special Jigsaw), and Russell Brand. There’s a central routine about why he agreed to appear on the Channel 4 Dispatches documentary investigating allegations of abuse against Brand, one that culminates – delightfully – on a ferry crossing from Stornoway the day after the broadcast.
It’s an example that Sloss’s best comedy has always drawn from his life rather than his opinions, as is his account of how he ended up marrying the sister of a former girlfriend tonight.
The show’s final routine is very Slossian in its flouting of any ideas of taste, a reminder that even at the age of 36 that precocious, wanting-to-shock teenager he was is never that far away. It’s also a reminder that it’s possible to be slightly appalled and amused at the same time.
And it’s why in the end Bitter is less a holding operation, more a reminder that Sloss is a tightrope walker, balancing at a giddy height. We watch to see if he will fall. But the truth is, he looks very much at home up there.