In Mumbai, Daniel Sloss delivers a crowd-pleasing and cathartic show

“There should not be this much tension in the room,” Daniel Sloss, the Scottish comedian, exclaimed to an enraptured audience in X, his 2019 HBO comedy special. For someone who has built a reputation for mining the fault lines of gender, masculinity, sex, and relationships in darkly comic material, inducing discomfort in his audience is both the purpose and the point of his punchlines. To sit through a Sloss show is to then come prepared to be needled and yet discover that no degree of fashioning can hold a candle to the surreptitious pivots that his comedy ultimately takes.

In many ways, that might be an apt introduction to Can’t, the riveting 90-minute-set that Daniel Sloss is currently touring, destinations of which included Bengaluru, Delhi, and Mumbai last week. In his last show in India, Sloss performed at Mumbai’s Mehboob Studios headlining the first edition of Laughing Dead Comedy Festival to a sold-out show, whose audience was made up of the city’s Twitter timeline. Take for instance, the pièce de resistance of the comedian’s set in Can’t which involved a reference to his fiance — the mother of his child — as a “cum guzzling whore.” The hilariously satisfying punchline arrived as a wicked culmination of a bit that interrogated polite male social conduct that should accompany an act of oral intercourse, bolstered immensely by Sloss’ knack for graphic physical performance.

This specific bit encapsulated the quality of a signature Sloss punchline to wear its provocation like a last-minute addition, as if its arrival is wholly unintended, which if anything guarantees that the audience never hesitates to be in his corner. Still, if his earlier specials (Dark, Jigsaw) displayed his fascination toward positing comedy as coping mechanism, Sloss seems more inclined here to harness it as power — the power to make the lines between offense and provocation distinct as well as redundant.

Can’t marked the comedian’s first set of shows in the country, each outing tailored to accommodate observations specific to the three cities. The Bengaluru show saw the comedian take a stab at the city’s injurious driving patterns and in Mumbai, a joke was constructed out of the ability of its barefooted shopkeepers to keep up with technological advancement. That is to say, even before the 32-year-old comedian appeared on stage the cheering audience heard him swear from backstage before they got to see him), he seemed to already have a hold on the crowd. When he finally walked on stage, Sloss was greeted by a protracted round of applause, a sign simultaneously of the cross-border appeal of his comedic voice as well as the extent to which Indian comedy audiences are starved of access to international acts.

Much of the comedian’s set hinged around dissecting the mounting societal sensitivity toward the unadulterated practice of comedy as an artform, replete with ingenious injections of vulnerability. His bits spanned primetime topics such as the effects of cancel culture, colonialism, and government interference in art layered upon rib-tickling descriptions of his confusion navigating life as a parent who witnessed his fiance confront the excruciating process of childbirth (“I watched my favourite person come out of my favourite end”).

Armed with a breathless energy, unending curse words, frequent wisecracks, and facial contortions, the impish comedian staged an act that digged deeper — way more than his previous work — into an ask for vulnerability and empathy. Sloss makes an observation about audiences being offended by jokes delivered by stand-up comedians often being an outcome of adults stripping themselves of their ability to empathize, a point that could have veered into generalization had it not been countered by the confessional indictments of Can’t. That being funny is a non-negotiable for any comedian complaining about the limitations of their freedom of speech is a line of thought that Sloss maintains throughout the set, shattering the widely-held aspersions that cancel culture is sounding the death knell on the comedic artform.

In that sense, Can’t marks a new direction in the comedian’s standard language of good-natured but no-filter comedy, the flames of its edginess matched by a level of perspective that compelling art demands. Still, ne of its many highlights were familiar Sloss inclusions, mainly the comedian continuing to eschew gendered expectations in the kind of topics male comedians are invested in articulating on stage. Considering that the set is in its initial stages of workshopping, Can’t is slightly let down by its excesses — in that, its cohesion could do well with material that is more tightly contained, in particular its ending. Yet it’d be unfair to acknowledge that comedy is after all, a give-and-take medium — the structure of any set is shaped primarily by how well it plays with the audience. If the Mumbai show is any indication, it’s safe to expect in its final form, Can’t will prove to turn its crowd-pleasing tendencies into catharsis.

The signs were there to see for the Mumbai audience last weekend — a sudden technical glitch with sound led to Sloss being almost inaudible to the crowd. “I wish I could do magic right now,” he yelled, rescinding his earlier dig against magicians that compared them with stand-up comedians, a bunch who, according to him, were the ones with talent. As if uncomfortable with the momentary silence in the room, Sloss took off his shirt and proceeded to do pushups until his mic started working again. At that point, there wasn’t as much tension in the crowd as there was full-throttled elation — somewhat of a collective vote that Sloss is the kind of comedian who can effortlessly turn any moment into a personality contest and emerge victorious as well.

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