God Is A Scottish Drag Queen IV

Mike Delamont—MTYP – Mainstage

Mike Delamont has a good thing going on. He could probably go to Fringe festivals for as long as he wants to and get sell-out crowds at every performance, by doing the same thing over and over again. Name recognition can keep something going a long time, even when the present work might not be as good as it was originally. Delamont jokes that just like the Indiana Jones trilogy couldn’t be left there, he couldn’t stop at a trilogy either. Of course, he knows what people say about the fourth Indiana film.

Like previous iterations, this is basically a one-hour stand-up comedy routine by Delamont in a wig and flowery skirt, that he delivers while barefoot and pacing slowly forward and backward on stage. This time around, he doesn’t explain how he as God ended up in drag, so newbies – about half the audience when I went – might not understand this aspect of the show. He jokes about religion about half the time, and his main targets this time around are the Jehovah’s Witnesses as well as Jesus’s decline as a person after the Bible stories.

Some jokes are stand-outs, like him saying he as God is anti-vaxer because vaccines get in the way of him using plagues on peoples who disobey, as he used to do so in the Bible. Some jokes – like his screed against the musical Cats – didn’t register much with me, although the audience laughed at pretty much everything he said. For a change of pace, he got more serious and thoughtful when talking about the grim recent events in Orlando as well as the increasing atmosphere of intolerance in the United States, and this was effective. At the end of the show, Delamont hinted he may return as the devil for next year’s Fringe, but it wasn’t clear if he was joking or not. That would be a really good shake-up.

Konrad Antony