It’s a packed house on a drizzly Monday night at the Monkey Barrel– an infamous comedy cavern in Edinburgh–where Daniel Sloss, the semi-famous viral Scottish comic known for his rants on sexual assault, is trying out his new material. The comedy shop is an underground labyrinth of stifling hot rooms and located just above the seedy cowgate, a cobbled strip of backpacker hostels and nightclubs. These caves are technically bricked-in compartments within the arches of a bridge, where the city’s poorest residents once lived and shit in buckets. Now, these caves are where comics willingly melt under bright lights and try out new material in preparation for the Fringe Festival–Edinburgh’s mainstay operation that fuels the city’s obsession, infatuation, exploitation, and addiction to the arts. Comedy is king in Edinburgh, but poetry, as Sloss says, is for fucking losers.

That’s what this set is about. Losers telling on losers. Gossip rants. Who is ‘fucking’ who. And a city where drug dealers become booking agents and start up management careers on the back of the comedy circuit. If you don’t know Sloss, he’s a Macaulay-Culkin-looking guy with a hotter accent and a bigger dick (according to him, not me). Sloss makes a punchline out of his fame, the kind of Scottish notoriety one gets where a Glaswegian can insult your comedy routine to your face, but if an Englishman does it, that same asshole will turnaround and ‘glass’ him for you. Sloss is on friendly ground tonight, and the sold-out Edinburgh practice show kicks-off a stint of more practice shows during the Fringe only to set him up for a future New York tour. He promises the show “won’t be shit” but even if it was, it wouldn’t bother me. I’m the kind of audience member who laughs at anything. I am incredibly generous like that. Unless it’s Bill Burr bombing abortion jokes at a Canadian outdoor comedy festival while he stands on a bird-shit covered stage complaining about how the VIP section isn’t listening to him. That’s only funny after the fact.

The loser club

But Sloss is here to say something with his new routine, and that thing is: most guys are shit, they know they are shit, and they cover for each other’s shit. He zeroes in on the comedy circuit, first naming Russell Brand as a rapist now coddled by the right-wing conspiracy bro’s, and then calling out other losers who became comics, only to watch them become bullies themselves. And that’s what happens when an apex predator goes down. There’s always a fight for the vacant top-spot.

There’s a hierarchy to the comedy loser club, and Sloss, having achieved the fame-level that many underlings aspire to, is a jock amongst the poetry comics and the unfortunate-looking snaggletoothed jokers. He’s not horrid to look at, and this plays in his favour, but Sloss is not a cool jock either–his only proper fight was getting head-butted by a bloke on Niddry Street which ended in an argument with his own best mate, all while dressed in suit. The suit is a crucial detail for the 20-something millennial. Call it cringe but on Friday nights, I dressed in a flashy day-to-night pencil skirt outfit in case I needed to immediately hit a dance floor after my corporate job wrapped up. And I was always fucking ready.

Scotland’s sexual assault comedian

Whether he likes it or not, Sloss is now the comic for sexual assault. Trevor Noah gets race. Jim Jeffries got gun control. Chappell gets shitting on Kevin Hart. Ari Shaffir gets drugs and Judaism. Rife chose alienating women and some viral crowd work. Iliza Shlesinger gets millennial women problems. Every comic gets their thing. Sometimes they choose it, and sometimes it chooses them.

This is my first time seeing Sloss perform live, but his face pops-up in my social media feeds all the time. Sometimes it’s TikTok’s on the comparison between him and Rife, calling Sloss the actual comic women need to follow. But more often, it’s the clip where Sloss calls on men to “do better” as he tells a story about a woman who was sexually assaulted by a friend of his. Sloss appears to be doing the brave thing by naming these predators (which even he admits, is not that brave – so don’t put him on a fucking pedestal or google his internet history, after all he did bang his sister-in-law). And even though he is a dude calling out other dudes, what he’s actually doing is traitorous. He is betraying the ‘bro code’ – the implicit agreement of covering for one another’s misdeeds. He’s opening a closet of skeletons and being like, ‘look, there’s a bunch of rotting flesh in here’ and his majority female audience is like, ‘yeah we fucking know’ and his male audience is like, ‘I want to feed this kilt-wearing motherfucker to the loch ness monster.’

The joke isn’t lost on Sloss, who points out that men would rather believe in the existence of a mythical aquatic snake with no food source and no sexual partners, than any woman who accuses a man of sexual assault. But let’s be serious — the lonely sea serpent generates a lot of business and probably got a B in geography.

There’s a section where Sloss rants about the irony of having more left-leaning politics, but what he calls ‘left-wing’ doesn’t exactly fit with what he’s doing in this set. Because what Sloss wants, and so does the crowd, is the sweet delight of revenge. People want to believe that Russell Brand will get dragged through the town square as we all cheer in his humiliation but that’s idealistic. Brand is still getting regular work in the entertainment biz. And instead, it’s Sloss who gets a cold dose of reality when he agrees to participate in a documentary about Brand’s persona as a liberal while being a serial rapist. I haven’t seen the documentary, but Sloss is the only comic willing to sit in front of the camera (though he didn’t know it at the time). And then what happens? He gets dragged through the shit, and it’s his face plastered all over the news while drunk on a ferry.

He is rightly pissed off about this turn of events. Media are banging on his door. Social media is wilding out. Death threats come and go. Is this the left-wing to blame? Hmmm… not really? This is the patriarchal ship righting itself, trying to fling traitorous kilt-wearing losers into the sea, so men can keep cheating on their wives in peace. Social media has really killed the vibe of raucous infidelity.

I could use another drink

At this point, everyone in the ‘cavern of the poor’ is sweating under the lights. There’s no fan. No air circulation. It’s an underground bunker of comedy. My cider is finished and I have to pee. But I’m in the second row, and Sloss is not “naming names” but he is hard hinting at the mega comedy stars on taskmaster, live at the apollo, and other various UK shows I don’t watch, that these guys are banging women everywhere, hiring escorts, and doing alot of cocaine. Of course these famous comics are not calling out Brand as a rapist because they don’t want to get expensive divorces when all their secrets are exhumed from the internet cemetery. Who has the time for that? They’d have to hire assistants, and try not to bang them, just to deal with all the paperwork.

Men are brutal creatures and they aren’t holding each other accountable. The scribbled notebook Sloss refers to is laying out this tale as old as time. He goes on tangents. Circles back to his point. And mixes hard truths with comedic release. I like laughing and I like cry-laughing, and Sloss accomplishes both of these feats. So, well done. Five stars.

If I’m to give you a comedy review of this work-in-progress, before the actual work-in-progress tour begins, it’s that Sloss isn’t going change this set at all. He’s busy watching notifications on his phone when big sexual assault trials happen because his clips go viral again, and then he’s at the playground with his kids getting somewhat recognized, but also ignored.

I’m sure this guy would have preferred to have gone viral for a something else, but that’s the thing about comedy, the audience gets to decide what they like about you. And on a rainy Monday night in Edinburgh, people liked hearing the gossip about a bunch of fucking losers.

Loser Gossip: A comedy night work-in-progress review with Daniel Sloss / Double spaced by Lexie Angelo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0