Chris Mcglade: Northern Monkey

Laughing Horse @ Espionage (Venue 185)

Class feels like every Fringe’s great, unaddressed issue, in tandem with stand-ups that predominately play the circuit feeling aggrieved at perceived media snobbery towards them. Even within these two camps though, there’s generally a liberal orthodoxy of opinion that Brexit is a disaster and that stand-ups shouldn’t punch down towards certain groups.

What sets Chris Mcglade apart, as an avowed representative of working men’s clubs, is that he forcefully challenges such convictions and makes you confront your own prejudices. And while he does that with not a little joke-writing craft, it’s the passion and power of his delivery that resonates.

Looming offstage, railing loudly off mic, getting right up in the faces of his front row, he’s not slow to judge, attributing fair and exaggerated characteristics. Alternating between pride, bitterness and contempt, it’s not always apparent whether he’s joking or not, but he implores you for a reaction.

Motivation is largely redundant. Because as he’s at pains to point out, offence is a luxury for those that have the time and resources to be offended. His wife didn’t blink at Tyson Fury’s regressive sexism, simply noting that gypsies are hardly known for their sensitivity.

Mcglade makes no apologies for who he is: a disenfranchised, cocaine and sex-appreciating, sometime football hooligan grandfather from Middlesbrough, relating his experiences with a consistently funny, matterof-fact honesty that dares you to judge him back. That’s especially true regarding Brexit.

Of Irish stock, he maintains that he couldn’t give a fuck about immigrants. He voted Leave because he didn’t like the way the press were trying to influence him, furious that he and 17 million like him are now being dismissed as racist.

Confounding orthodoxy again, with a closing poem that’s largely stripped of pacifying irony, he demands the right to be heard. Job done.

Until tomorrow. Today 7pm.