Adrienne Truscott's Asking for It: A One-Lady Rape About Comedy Starring Her Pussy and Little Else!

2013 is already being celebrated as the year of feminist comedy. And that's not a surprise, given how our cultural dialogue has changed and your average White Van Man probably has an opinion about the patriarchy. But this show...

Truscott arrives on stage, drunk and naked from the waist down, and makes some really, really lame jokes about date rape. Then she projects some images onto her crotch and makes vagina puppets. So far, so Fringe. There is a point though, as she moves on to a faux-naive attack on famous rape culture apologists like Todd Aiken and Daniel Tosh.

The targets should be familiar, if you've been keeping up, but few people are willing to offer up their own vagina as a prop in the discussion. Is it okay to rape her, or joke about raping her, because she's drunk and provocatively (un)dressed? Or should a bunch of old white dudes make laws to protect it because she's clearly incapabale of managing it herself? By getting her ladyjunk out, Truscott very pointedly underlines how ridiculous these conversations are.

It might sound like political performace art, and that's because it is. But it's also very, very funny, with some terrific bellylaughs, mostly derived from trying to follow the logic of Republicans who claim that rape babies are a gift from God. Truscott's created an old-school alternative comedy show here: political, satirical, experimental, occasionally unsure of itself, but willing to charge headfirst until it reaches a conclusion. Balls-out feminism with brilliant humour. If you missed this show then you missed the Fringe.