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The Comedian vs. the Crowd
Disruptive audiences nearly drove James Acaster from stand-up. Instead, he decided to embrace the hecklers.
He followed this up in 2018 with Repertoire, an ambitious, four-part Netflix special culled from his Edinburgh shows featuring a virtuosic blend of character-based fictions, gangly slapstick, precise observational comedy, and biting political commentary. At various points, he’s an undercover cop, juror in a criminal trial, proprietor of a fraudulent honey business, and head of a conga line crumbling under the pressures of leadership, and he sneaks deceptively deep personal revelations into these elaborate, silly narratives. Acaster’s frustrations with that emerging dynamic informed the writing of his acclaimed 2020 special, Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999, in which he dropped character onstage for the first time since he was an open-mic act and told true stories from his life.
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