Martin Urbano: Jimmy Carr-style jokes as craftsmanlike as they are tasteless

In character as a disgraced comedian against whom allegations have been made, the US comic delivers irony and and outrageous laughs aplenty

Time was, you could get a long way in the comedy industry by being a sleazy little creep, and of course many such acts ended up blurring the line between the character they played on stage and their behaviour in private, hence the ongoing series of cancellations in comedy’s upper echelons. Nowadays, it has largely gone out of style as a mode of performance, and there’s a sense that someone like Jimmy Carr, despite his ongoing success, is a relic of a more insensate era. It would be difficult to get that act off the ground in 2024, you’d think.
Nevertheless, Edinburgh Newcomer award nominee Martin Urbano is making inroads, gaining territory in this world by moving under a heavy cloak of irony. This is not the kind of show where you learn anything about the performer – I think it’s probably true that he’s a New Yorker and of Mexican heritage, but the rest he keeps close to his chest. His repeated claims that he’s an unrepentant sex offender are clearly not to be taken at face value.
Over the course of his debut hour Apology Comeback Tour, Urbano often reminded me of Carr, using the same rhythmic one-liners, the heavy use of pull-back-and-reveal, and the frequent -use of paedophilia as a punchline. He even brings a little of that same light-entertainment energy to the small room at the top of Soho Theatre, purring smoothly with his rich voice, moving with uncanny roboticism and grinning inanely at the terrible things he’s saying.
Theoretically there’s a high concept to what he’s doing: he’s in character as a disgraced comedian against whom certain allegations have been made, and despite the title of the show he’s here to tell us that he doesn’t think he has done anything wrong and that “believe women” shouldn’t be a hard and fast rule. The night I caught him, it was the women in the audience who were laughing the hardest, at Urbano’s pitch-perfect recreation of the comedy industry’s countless apparent misogynists.
But, while many of comedy’s “edgelords” seem to lack any real sense of self-awareness, Urbano sometimes seems trapped in a cage of self-knowing. The irony throughout the hour is so thick that it’s a relief when he breaks for a second, asking himself through an audience surrogate: “Martin, have you ever tried to examine your work and why it seems to pander to an audience you claim to disagree with?” It’s probably a question more comics should be asking themselves.
Urbano teases like a natural though. “I know you’re all laughing for the right reasons,” he smiles, heavy-lidded. The suffocating ironic remove of this show makes it hard to truly love, but you can’t deny the forceful home runs of his joke writing. He has an interesting habit of pausing before a punchline, leaving the audience dangling, daring you to anticipate what he’s about to say. And even though all the punchlines hew closely to a similar formula, they’re very difficult to guess and almost always hilarious – the mark of an expert craftsman.
Until Jan 20; sohotheatre.com