The comedian was only halfway through his set when four people in the front row stormed out. One of them kicked the door open so ferociously that it crashed into one of the other acts. He then dropped his beer and the glass smashed on the floor. Oh, the drama!
All of this took place last Tuesday at Comedy Unleashed, the monthly stand-up night in London I run with Andy Shaw. We have no requirements for acts to be provocative, but we do encourage them not to self-censor. We also regularly book Scott Capurro - the comedian who had caused the “offence”on this occasion - who happens to be one of the most controversial stand-ups on the circuit. The Guardian once attempted to summarise his act in the form of an equation: “Larry Grayson x (Lenny Bruce + Chris Rock) = Scott Capurro”.
Of course, anybody is entitled to walk out of a comedy show. I consider it a perfectly reasonable response. If you’re not enjoying yourself, why should you stick around and waste your time? But when it comes to those who subsequently write letters of complaint and demand refunds, I am less sympathetic. To be offended by a joke is a matter of pure subjectivity. We can only platform the comedians; we cannot guarantee how the audiences will react.
This didn’t prevent one angry punter from getting in touch after the show. The email exchange went as follows:
Needless to say, the complainant didn’t get a refund.
At Comedy Unleashed, we’ve cultivated a comedy-literate audience; those who return frequently to our shows understand that jokes aren’t to be taken at face value. There are plenty of other clubs that guarantee a sanitised output for the sake of the pearl-clutchers, those who feel sufficiently entitled to demand that comedians revise their material so as not to cause offence. I suppose this kind of mentality is connected to a general rise in literal-mindedness. We needn’t worry about whether or not the chicken who crossed the road was free range, because the chicken does not exist. Of course, this concept will mystify those who are determined to perceive jokes as literal expressions of a comedian’s worldview.
We saw this kind of literal-mindedness when the Pleasance Theatre Trust cancelled Jerry Sadowitz’s show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2022. The promoters issued a statement claiming that “opinions such as those displayed on stage by Sadowitz are not acceptable”. But there were no “opinions” in Sadowitz’s show; there were jokes. If the Pleasance Theatre Trust doesn’t understand the essential theatricality of stand-up, it’s really not fit for purpose. If its board members ever attended a production of Oedipus Rex, they’d probably storm out in a rage and denounce Sophocles for his endorsement of patricide and incest.
When I was interviewed recently at Comedy Unleashed for a segment on Sky News, the reporter asked me what I thought about the “transphobia” she had heard on stage that night. I pointed out that there had been no transphobia, but there had been jokes at the expense of gender authoritarians who seek to impose their values on everybody else. I argued that comedy becomes incoherent if one insists on interpreting it literally. This part of the interview didn’t make the cut, but what remains can be seen here:
When we set up Comedy Unleashed in 2018, many regime comedians criticised our project as being “pointless”. No performers are being censored, they assured us, and so we were whipping up a “culture war” for purely opportunistic reasons. Fast forward six years, and comedians that have had shows cancelled for wrongthink include: Jerry Sadowitz, Leo Kearse, Alistair Williams, Andrew Lawrence, Mary Bourke, Nohun, Samantha Pressdee and Roy “Chubby” Brown. The list keeps growing, and all the while the doyens of the comedy industry are insisting that there is no problem at all. They are like the cartoon dog in the famous meme, sitting inside a burning house declaring: “This is fine”.
Then there was the cancellation of our Comedy Unleashed show at last year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. We had booked a one-off event at the Leith Arches, and it had quickly sold out. But a couple of days beforehand, the venue posted a statement on Instagram. “We DO NOT suppprt (sic) this comedian, or his views and he WILL NOT be allowed to perform at our venue and is CANCELLED from Thursdays (sic) comedy show with immediate effect”. What they lacked in literacy they more than made up for in indignation.
The venue was objecting to the inclusion on the bill of Graham Linehan, creator of Father Ted, The IT Crowd and Black Books, a man whose belief in biological sex has made him persona non grata in the comedy industry. We found a replacement venue, which also cancelled on us, and so eventually the show went ahead on a makeshift platform outside the Scottish parliament. Surely the fact that one of the most successful living comedy writers has to struggle to perform at the largest arts festival in the world should give the industry pause for thought?
One of the worst aspects of this febrile climate is that self-censorship is now the norm. Many of the comedians who appear at Comedy Unleashed tell me that it’s the only club where they feel they can broach certain topics. Others have confessed that they routinely temper their material out of fear that activists will attempt to cancel them. Up-and-coming comics who are naturally subversive cannot thrive when the gatekeepers of their industry feel it is their duty to promote the “correct” message rather than make people laugh. The woke movement has been a disaster for the arts.
When King Lear demands that his Fool exercise some restraint in his brutally honest barbs, he does so in the form of a threat. “Take heed, sirrah – the whip”. The Fool is having none of it. “Truth’s a dog must to kennel” he says. “He must be whipped out when the Lady Brach may stand by th’ fire and stink”. So while the truth-telling dog is thrown outdoors, the Lady Brach, the bitch of flattery, can warm herself by the fire, her stench permeating the entire household.
Thankfully, there are still clowns who do not fear the whip. And all of them are welcome at Comedy Unleashed.
PS. I’ll be performing at our next Comedy Unleashed show in London on 12th March. Tickets are available here. And for those in the north, check out details of our forthcoming shows in Leeds.
Thank you for continuing to expose the hypocrisy of the comedy establishment. It’s telling that the public statement from Leith Arches referred to Graham Linehan being “cancelled” and made it clear that it was because they don’t like his views. As gender critical views are protected in law, this would appear to be an admission of unlawful discrimination. The venue was more circumspect when I complained to them last summer. They told me: “We are not against freedom of speech; The show is not a good fit for our venue.” The decision was not, they said, influenced by their personal opinion but by their “Community”. The LGBT+ Community is a considerable part of their business, they told me. So it seems that cancellation is OK as long as you’re doing it because of someone else’s bigotry rather than your own.
Great article. What I'm wondering though: are they really so literal-minded, or are they perfectly capable of understanding the joke if they want to?
Take for example this joke by Ricky Gervais: https://youtube.com/shorts/pf_vexBS794?si=kN51jO-Pd5RylCfk
If ideologues took everything literally, would they have been offended? After all, the ostensible target of this joke is gender critical women (or at least women who are concerned about males accessing single sex places). Gervais is taking on the persona of a gender ideologue who is ridiculing these women for their outdated and bigoted views.
The joke works because he manages to satirize this viewpoint by pretending to straightfacedly advocate for it in a way that makes it sound completely ridiculous and unreasonable, so we laught "at" the speaker instead of "with" him. (The satire in Jonathan Swift''s A Modest Proposal works the same way.)
But why are gender ideologues upset at the joke? Because they understand, as well as we do, that they are the actual butt of the joke, not GC women. They know not to take it literally.