About halfway through the show, Bianca Del Rio grabs her glass of wine, leans on her cocktail table and says “By now you’re looking at me and you’re thinking – she’s a lot”.

And she isn’t wrong. Bianca is a lot of things – feisty, fierce and armed with a cutting wit that left the Cape Town audience in stitches on Friday night.

After sold-out performances in Ireland, Australia, the UK and the USA, self-proclaimed ‘clown in a dress’ Bianca brought her ‘Rolodex of hate’ to the Artscape for the South African leg of the Blame it on Bianca Del Rio comedy tour.

Roy Haylock, the genius behind Bianca Del Rio, has spent most of his life in the theatre working primarily as a costumer. He has been nominated for 13 Big Easy Entertainment Awards for costume design, winning six, the first of which when he was only 17.

Haylock has also worked as a costumer for Broadway shows, ballet, and opera.

Haylock started performing as Bianca Del Rio in 1996, where she was quickly recognised for her comedic chops and phenomenal performances, winning New Orleans Gay Entertainer of the Year three years running.

She took that unmistakeable charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent all the way to the top of season six of RuPaul’s Drag Race, the reality television show that would propel her to international fame. On Drag Race, drag queens compete to be America’s next drag superstar.

Bianca distinguished herself early in the competition before snatching the crown. Since then she has starred in two films, hosted a web series, made multiple television appearances and launched her stand-up comedy career, performing to sold-out audiences around the globe.

For the Cape Town queer community, a visit from Bianca Del Rio was the social event of the year, and everyone turned up and turned out. Fans arrived in their best drag or as their best selves, showcasing the creativity of gender fluidity and self-expression.

The excitement in the theatre at the start of the show was palpable. Once on stage Bianca was quick to remind the audience that she’s a ‘nasty, hateful c***’. A necessary disclaimer, because nobody is safe at one of her shows.

Bianca takes all those ‘unmentionable topics’ like religion, politics, gender, body politics and race and propels them at her audience in an intelligent, cutting and undeniably hilarious way.

South Africans are no strangers to self-reflective humour, especially when it comes to our contentious political climate. The USA has also deployed comedy as the first line of defence against political fatigue (early in the show, Bianca describes Donald Trump as “reverse racism racoon”).

In these moments the audience is invited to laugh at themselves, and the effect is unmistakable. Bianca simultaneously brings the harsher side of society to the fore, at the same time using charm and humour to give her audience a way to both confront and deal with it.

Here’s the crowd’s reaction at the end of her Cape Town show:

Bianca effortlessly jumps from one topic to the next, but it’s never over the top. Rather, in a world where daily events border on the absurd, Blame it on Bianca Del Rio provides us with two hours of escape and comedic hatefulness – the relief that we all need and deserve.

Word of warning though – if you sit in the front row, expect to be read for filth.