Fringe Fest 2013: God Is a Scottish Drag Queen

God is back in a hilarious new guise

A Scottish drag queen performs a standup act based loosely on the theme that he’s God and has a thing or two to tell you. He’s more of a man in a dress, really — a loud, sweaty Scottish man in a dress. So if you’re looking for the usual drag act feel, you won’t find it here. But what’s not to love about a large, yelling Scot in a dress? That kind of thing seems expressly designed to tickle my sides.

I don’t know if he’s actually Scottish. No matter how genuinely Scottish a person is, I can’t help thinking that they’re all just putting on a comical, fake accent for my amusement. In any case, his ad-libbed Toronto-based humour on subjects like the humidity and the atmosphere of the Fringe (“It’s hard to know where the Fringe is in your stupidly huge and spread-out city!”) was a big crowd-pleaser.

His other, non-Toronto-based material was consistently funny, too, with many fantastically good jokes about Sodom and Gomorrah and so on. However, his interactions with the audience were not terribly successful, and the humour was occasionally (luckily, not that often!) snore-inspiringly broad, straying into banalities of the “Oh, you Canadians are so polite” type.

But I enjoyed it. It wasn’t a very queer show (though, when the topic came up, it was clear he was on our side), but maybe that’s a good thing. It’s nice to go out and see something different, with little or no political element, and just relax and be amused by the silliness of it.

God Is a Scottish Drag Queen

Factory Theatre Mainspace

125 Bathurst St

Jeremy Willard is a Toronto-based freelance writer and editor. He's written for Fab Magazine, Daily Xtra and the Torontoist. He generally writes about the arts, local news and queer history (in History Boys, the Daily Xtra column that he shares with Michael Lyons).

Read More About:
Culture, Theatre, Arts, Toronto, Drag

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