Daniel Sloss – ‘Hubris’
If you have watched any of Sloss’s previous shows (Dark, Jigsaw, and X), you will expect from him a pensive wrap-up at the end of the show and more “plain wrongs” than “plain funny”. This guy always low-key tries hard to be nice and high-key tries hard to be provacative. Hubris, however, subtly defines the expectation in that it contains much less of the thoughtful side and much more of the offensiveness.
Let’s put it this way: the entire show is the most narcissistic (C’mon! The title is Hubris!) show off of Sloss’s writing and eloquence. Hubris kicks off with insulting the Americans about their inability to swear properly. The “fuck-shit-cunt” b-boxing is followed by ridicules on Prince Andrew’s sex life and the mundane of 2021. The topics are switch fluidly like a flying jet (because trains are two slow) of thoughts, and after all the “lighthearted-ness” (by his own standard), he treads into the most dangerous part of his repertoire, a Hiroshima A-bomb joke meticulously constructed, so that the punchline explodes amidst Japanese cultural insults and pedophilia jokes.
On the other hand, Hubris is the least topical Sloss show ever. There are sporadic remarks on issues like the current political climate and toxic masculinity, but there isn’t a delightfully didactic TEDTalk section. His only actual agenda here seems to be “if a comedian feels they’re being cancelled, it’s because their jokes aren’t funny”. Therefore, I’m going to end this not-really-a-review with an argument that any joke is going to be funny, as long as it’s told in the right way and in front of the right audience, because the sense of humor is as personal as fetishes. The best thing about Daniel Sloss as a comedian is his ability to brutally tickle but to never penetrate the skins of his most “sensitive” intelligentsia type of audience.