Comedy is a tough racket. And Adrienne Truscott is new to the game, or so she told the rowdy, expectant crowd packed into Joe's Pub for last Saturday’s midnight performance of her one woman stand up performance, Asking For It. While comedienne may not always have been on Truscott's resume, the award winning performer has been entertaining in one form or another for decades, from dancing to singing to performing as one half of the “neo-vaudvellian collaboration,” the Wau Wau Sisters.
To say that she "puts it all out there" in Asking For It is both quite an understatement and quite literal. From the moment she walks out, she wears a curly blonde wig, a denim jacket, huge white platform heels, and nothing else. Nothing else. Not only is she pantsless, but as alluded to by the title of the show, Ms. Truscott bases her entire performance around telling jokes about rape. With such a controversial and sensitive topic serving as the source material for her hour long gig, the fact that she kept a diverse audience of New Yorkers laughing is a testament to her excellent comedic timing and her acute self-awareness, both in regards her own physical presence and about the show as a whole.
She wants to shock and challenge us — after all, isn’t that a large part of what comedy is about: pushing the boundaries of what’s acceptable? Her show highlights the lopsidedness of this line of thought about “free speech” in comedy. Male comedians tell rape jokes at an alarming rate and without much consequence, Daniel Tosh being a particularly famous example, so why shouldn’t the PBR swilling Truscott have the same privileges?
Because she forces us to look at the most intimate parts of her body in a brash, completely unapologetic way, Truscott forces us into the position of voyeur and leaves us to formulate our own reactions to the elements of the show that she whips at us with lightning speed. In a way, the whole show asks the audience to consider how, why, and when we laugh. It's interesting to see the way she tests the audience, tossing a medley of comedy tropes in a bag with some serious political assertions and asking us to deal with it.
Sometimes her comedy is physical and derives from absurdity and excess, undoubtedly a byproduct of her time as a dancer and vaudevillian. She strips off layers of denim jackets and bras, then pulls off two of three blonde wigs and uses them as impromptu pom poms. In one of the evening's funniest moments of slapstick, she proclaims, “Let's just deal with the elephant in the room,” pulling on a dress that covers up everything -- except the…er...elephant in the room she meant to address. "I didn’t remember how high this stage was!” She winks down at a man blushing in the front row.
Other times however, the laughter is different, and isn’t as easy. She makes a straightforward joke about rape, or a joke in which a female rapes a man, and the laughter grows uncomfortable. Sometimes the audience laughs in a groan at the absurdity or ignorance of a comment made by a public figure, such as in a long bit she does on "legitimate rape." The range of comedy by necessity keeps the audience on its toes, ever aware of when they should and shouldn’t be laughing. And there were a couple of moments when the show was pointedly political. Rape, after all, isn’t funny one bit, and Truscott knows, and wants us to know, we’re all in very murky waters. She looks at us, expecting, and sometimes the room just went dead. Right, we’re talking about rape here.
In comedy, perhaps more so than straightforward theater, the audience provides a real time litmus test of how the show is going, and from town to town, and in Truscott's case, country to country -- she recently returned from a run in Australia -- the crowd differs from night to night. But Truscott seems perfectly at ease and in control from the moment she steps out on stage, and she’s a master at gauging an audience. When she senses she's losing people, or she’s pushed the envelope just a bit too far, she pulls back with perfectly timed, spitfire precision.
So with a topic like rape -- a national and international crisis -- is laughing enough? Judging from the crowd at Joe's Pub, at least it's a good place to start.
Read our interview with Adrienne Truscott here.
