Rick Shapiro

Rick Shapiro is unwell.

Somewhere between the demented spiel of a backstreet bum and the shirtless antics of a Funhouse-era Iggy Pop, Rick Sharpiro's lunatic ramblings dwell at the point in which comedy and horror collide. As he paces the tiny attic where he currently resides, locked away like the mutant twin of some cleaner, nicer stand-up, the audience visibly recoils. Throughout this evening's set, Shapiro will have only the most passing relationship with the stage. He prowls the aisle, hangs from the rafters ("I feel like Sarah Silverman’s clitoris"), and flaps about like a man possessed, all the while scarcely pausing for breath. There are no safe routines about airline food here: old Rick is made of darker meat.

How to describe the experience without descending into sub-NME hyperbole? The man is without peer. He enters the stage in a flurry of papers and slurred quips. As his hour’s end approaches, the audience have been dragged through a personal hell of psych-wards and treatments, bad drugs and worse, sex and treated to a musical finale as oddly moving as it is censor-batingly hilarious. Impossibly, we have been driven to tears of sinful laughter throughout, a boiling point of release that never lets up. Venues as small as these can be acutely claustrophobic, especially when the pace drops; nothing feels more awful than a shared silence. Yet, on those few moments when Shapiro pauses to refuel his reserves of dirty thoughts, we pause with him.