“It’s never alright to beat your wife, but…”
No matter how Bill Beteet chose to end that “joke” he still wouldn’t have had a laugh from the audience and would have proved that, regardless of what he had just told us, he certainly was not a feminist. He’d lost us before that though, at the idea the Manchester bomber’s devastating actions were because he’d been rejected by a girl. It really just is too soon to be saying those kind of things, Beteet has got to learn to read the crowd better. From there on things got increasingly painful, exceptionally quickly. People walked out and almost everyone else was looking at their shoes. It was a bizarre form of torture where we were trapped in a room with a man laughing at himself dying on stage as he spouted vitriolic statements, most of which he probably didn’t believe.
Comedy can and should push boundaries and talk about controversial issues, but there is honestly nothing about his set that is comedic. Even before the aforementioned comments, there was no shape to his show. The narrative doesn’t flow, he looks unbearably uncomfortable on stage, and you can hear his comedian mates at the back doing over the top laughs to fill the silence.
Beteet couldn’t have fallen from a higher place. The compere and two warm up acts have some brilliant material; it’s genuinely like being at the Laugh Factory. We were a small crowd but it was an intimate venue, the atmosphere was brilliant, and the audience was warm and receptive. Then it sunk like a stone when the headliner arrived.
I’ve never come out of a comedy gig seething before, it’s an odd experience and I won’t make that mistake again. Avoid Beteet like the plague friends, there is no reason to cause yourself such unnecessary pain.
Bill Beteet: If you feel like killing yourself, call me
Just the Tonic at the caves
Cowgate
Runs until 26th August, 10.20pm
simplystageytix 