Fat Sex: Quick, Clever and Drawn Out

Pay attention, it’s fast! Steve Larkin is a British spoken-word artist who has written and performed several poems and songs pertaining to many topics that people could easily get offended by. The name of his show relates to a poem he reads about women’s magazines and their obsession with fat and sex. This poem goes on for quite a long time in a psychotic mantra-like style. Much of the content is lost because his northern English accent is a little thick and he’s speaking so fast that you can miss some of the words.

When Larkin is just talking to the audience, he is quite enjoyable. His way of talking somehow reminded me of Ted Talks and I found it to be quite witty and entertaining, like British humor usually is. I particularly liked how he gave our audience a collective name—“Neil”—so as to make the show feel more intimate. I feel like he’s the kind of guy you’d want to have at a small party or go to the bar with, but only if you’re with other people who won’t get offended by the humor of a “cunning linguist that will tantalize you with [his] mother tongue”.

Larkin spends a large portion of his rant singing and playing the mandolin. He is a fine player and his singing is good. The songs he sings are musically simple but well done. I did find they went on for a bit too long. This complaint I had with his poems as well. He guaranteed us that we would like at least one of his poems or songs in the show. I’m not sure I particularly liked any of them, but I didn’t particularly hate any of them either. I’m not too big into poetry though, so maybe that’s actually a good thing. All in all, if he balanced it out by cutting the singing and poetry down to half as much and doubled the speaking I would actually have LOVED this show.