Adrienne Truscott: the naked comic

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/jan/01/adrienne-truscott-naked-comic-standup

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Adrienne Truscott apologises to me before our meeting: the video she sent of her standup routine invites a certain awkwardness when encountering her in person. In the five-minute clip she is outrageous, raucous and viciously funny. She is also naked from the waist down. "Sorry!" she says again, as we shake hands at the door of her apartment in Brooklyn. She smiles ruefully. "Was it too much?"

The show, Asking for It: A One-Lady Rape About Comedy, won her the Foster's comedy award at the Edinburgh festival this year and dropped a lot of jaws. Truscott, whose background is in cabaret, walks on stage in heels, bra, denim jacket, platinum blonde wig and nothing else. The terrified audience squeaks with laughter. "Anyone here been raped?" she calls cheerfully. "Or has anyone raped anyone?" She raises her own hand. The audience erupts.

It's not for everyone, including Truscott's own mother, who is English and rather gamely asked to see the performance before her daughter gently dissuaded her. Truscott's nudity is not designed to be alluring. In fact, it is incredibly aggressive, a subversion of how women are conditioned to perceive and use their own bodies. Her aim was, first and foremost, to be funny, and beyond that to confront the way rape is referred to by male comedians – in particular Daniel Tosh, a US comedian who silenced a female heckler recently with the zinger, "Wouldn't it be funny if that girl got raped by like, five guys right now?", a comment other male comedians failed to condemn. "No one said, 'Dude, that was a bad joke.' The response to criticism was, 'Oh, you don't believe in free speech?' Oh, for fuck's sake, it's not that black and white."

She also wanted to make a point about emphasis. "To show the flip side of the attention that's always on victims – the worst version of which is 'You asked for it', and the best version, 'That shouldn't have happened to her.' No no no. He shouldn't have done it. That was my whole thing: to bring that into the room."

The room, a bookstore in Edinburgh, was nerve-rackingly personal: no lights, no stage, no distance between Truscott and the front row. No one could leave without the entire room noticing – given the material, it amused Truscott to note that this acted as a powerful disincentive. "You can't get up because it's like," – sotto voce – "is that the rapist?!" She laughs.

Although it is more challenging, Truscott's preference is to perform before a mainstream audience, rather than a self-selected group of woman-friendly activists or supporters. (She is canny enough to know that being described as a "feminist performance artist", even though she is a feminist performer, "would be the death of it.")

The idea for the show came about after she spent a week as an entertainer on a lesbian cruise ship. "You go to sea for a week with 1,800 lesbians, and there's a philosophy of incredible sensitivity on the boat which, for a comic, can get to the point of ..." She mimes tearing her hair out. "It would elicit late-night comedic purges from a lot of the comics. I made a joke about rape, someone else made one back, and it felt like there was something cathartic going on. We were making jokes about how we feel the world treats it."

The morning after she won the award at Edinburgh, a TV journalist asked her where on Earth she thought she could perform the show, outside of fringe theatre. She was hungover, and replied without thinking. "I said, 'Well if you think about how everybody likes to laugh, and how many people get raped, it's a super-mainstream show.'" She smiles. "Too much?"

• Soho theatre, London W1 (020-7478 6100), 12-31 May

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