Bulletproof

For a show that purports to mock reductive stereotypes, joking about Scotland being a land of drunks is not the best opening gambit. It is the first of several missteps that Shazia Mirza makes in Bulletproof, which oversells the profundity of its premise without ever really exploring it.

Buried within its general mediocrity, there is the germ of an interesting idea: can words, or jokes, ever be truly dangerous? The subject is huge and tangled, and as a result Mirza seems hesitant to fully engage with it. Instead, her humour is largely anecdotal, as she describes how she inadvertently offended the Nigerian finance minister and tells of a gig in Pakistan that required a bulletproof vest. The result is less an exploration of free speech than a standup pleading for sympathy over the tough receptions she has endured.

It would be no surprise if most could not summon such sympathy. Mirza blithely pegs her audience as a crowd of typical Guardian readers; and while this may be a dig at her own work as a columnist for that paper, it's an assessment that seems questionable to those of us who prefer the Morning Star. Unfortunately, she sticks to this characterisation throughout. When lines fall flat, she's quick to accuse quiet onlookers of scandalised, middle-class nervousness.

If the crowd fitted her assumptions, this might be true. But this is the Fringe, which instills a higher tolerance of controversial material than comics like Mirza may suspect. It never occurs to her that people aren't laughing for a far more obvious reason.