Jetting in from New York and performing in front of 14 punters on the Free Fringe may not quite match the high of getting 1.2 million views for “Present/Tense”, Louis Katz’s comedy special on his YouTube channel.
Or three million for starring on “This is not Happening”, the American comedy storytelling TV series on Comedy Central, and there was a palpable feeling of frustration two thirds of the way through the Brooklyn-based stand-up’s Edinburgh debut run.
The problem? The audience, or rather most of the audience, were not laughing at his fast-flowing jokes, or not that much. How to deal with it?
“You shoulda come last night. It was sold out,” Katz, 44, inveighed to your reviewer, annoyingly scribbling away in the third row, as the bountifully bearded comic tried to squeeze some life out of his somnambulant, largely youthful, evening crowd by corralling them into making a noise.
His punchy material, a mixture of the smutty and the cerebral and the politically incorrect, covered a range of disparate subjects. It started off on a deceptively gentle note, talking about him and his wife trying to have a child (nice), before moving on to the grisly, graphic details (not so nice) and the not-so-subtle parental pressure.
Thereafter it jumped at whim from a valiant attempt to extract humour from the Israeli war in Gaza via a comparison of the combatants’ facial hair density and love of falafel, to a rant against the position of the semi-colon on the typewriter keyboard, before climbing back up into the political stratosphere to rail against the gender diversity warriors who were ensconced in the debate over whether women could have penises while the world was on fire.
Some of it, such as his references to “cursive writing” and Louis CK, the American actor and comedian, failed to make the transatlantic crossing; while his riff on longevity, in which he cleverly changed tone as he pictured speaking to his baby-pushing parents thinking “this could be the last time I’m hearing this story … for the millionth time”, may not have crossed the generational divide.
As for the semi-colon gag, Katz – who had bought a new pair of glasses for Edinburgh that made him “look like a Jew and a scientist who does experiments on Jews” – blamed the silence on antisemitism. Again, an awkward silence.
When one Asian gentleman, for whom the racy material was possibly not what he was looking for, decided to beat a retreat he couldn’t work out how to open the wooden door and Katz cannily stepped into the breach by helping him to exit his personal “nightmare”.
But the lack of approbation he was accustomed to clearly affected his flow.
Next time I’ll just have to make sure I go the night before.
Louis Katz: Bountiful Laughing Horse @ The Counting House Until 25 August.
