Another comedy show cancelled

Why won’t venues stand up to activists?

So it’s happened again. Comedy Unleashed, the stand-up night I run with Andy Shaw in London, Leeds and Manchester, was due to embark on a mini-tour of Ireland for just three nights in association with Gript Media. Inevitably, a herd of activists got upset and complained to one of the venues (this one in Drogheda) and the owners took the cowardly way out and pulled the gig.

This has now happened to Comedy Unleashed on five occasions, for no other reason than activists don’t approve of a certain kind of comedy (i.e., the funny kind). They prefer their stand-ups to be preachers in disguise, reinforcing the creed of Critical Social Justice. They may not make you laugh, but they’ll have you nodding along like a good little conformist and pretending to enjoy yourself.

It seems bizarre to me that when these pearl-clutchers make their complaints, the venues don’t simply explain to them that buying tickets is in no way compulsory. I find the idea of going to the cinema to watch any film directed by Michael Bay to be offensive, on the grounds that life is finite and we really shouldn’t be squandering time in such an egregious fashion. But I don’t email the cinemas demanding that they prevent other people from choosing their own forms of entertainment.

This is how authoritarians think. Because if something is not to their taste, nobody else must be able to decide for themselves whether they disagree. For disagreement is a symptom of free-thinking, of heresy, of the potential to stray from the script. And so of course there is now a growing list of comedians who’ve had their shows cancelled – including Jerry Sadowitz, Roy “Chubby” Brown, Andrew Lawrence, Samantha Pressdee, Leo Kearse and others – for no other reason that venue owners are capitulating to the bidding of the online mob.

My polite suggestion would be that if you’re running a venue for artists, but you are too frightened to programme creatives whose act falls foul of these modern-day Mary Whitehouses, you’re probably in the wrong job. Why not open a shop specialising in tropical fish instead? At least that way everyone will immediately see that you are committed to diversity.

The good news is that following the cancellation of our Comedy Unleashed show in Drogheda, we’ve found a new venue that is twice the size and tickets are fast selling out. So if it was the intention of the authoritarians to prevent people from seeing the show, they’ve made a serious tactical error.

A similar situation occurred after two successive venues cancelled our Comedy Unleashed show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe last year. There was a histrionic statement posted on Instagram by the first venue, Leith Arches, which said: “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”.

And who was the comedian on the bill they most objected to? It was none other than Graham Linehan, the BAFTA-award winning creator of sitcoms such as Father Ted, The IT Crowd and Black Books. Apparently taking the view that women’s rights still matter makes one a pariah in the comedy world. In the end, Graham and the other comedians on the bill agreed to perform on a makeshift platform outside the Scottish parliament. And so a one-off comedy gig became national news, and all because activists didn’t want anyone to see it or hear about it. These people aren’t the brightest.

Comedy is a natural front-line for the free speech wars, because the art form is inherently subversive and this means that some people will always be offended. While activists continue to insist that words and violence are identical, and that their feelings must be protected at all costs, stand-up comedy shows will be considered hotbeds of heresy. The UK comedy industry has been ideologically captured for quite some time, which explains why self-censorship is rife in the industry and so much televised comedy is unforgivably bland.

Every young comic knows that they must conform to the identity-obsessed diktats of the industry if they are to get anywhere. If you want to understand the extent of the problem, just consider what the director of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe comedy awards, Nica Burns, said of the nominees: “For the first time ever, we have a Best Comedy Show shortlist where male-identifying comedians are in the minority with representation across gender and sexuality spectrums”. And I thought comedians were there to make us laugh, not to act as bastions of voguish identity politics.

Quite apart from the gatekeepers in radio and television commissioning, the major problem we now face is that venue managers are generally willing to truckle to the demands of activists. I think it’s about time that they grew a spine and made a commitment to artistic expression. We need venues in all major cities that will ignore the braying of authoritarians and enable shows to go ahead as planned. But in the current climate, this scenario seems a long way off.

If you don’t want to watch a comedy show, just don’t buy a ticket. It really should be that simple.

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I’ll be performing at all three Comedy Unleashed shows in Ireland on 11, 12 and 13 September at Lucan, Dalkey and Newlands Cross. The other acts on the bill are Graham Linehan, Aidan Killian, Jonathan Kogan, Alistair Williams (Weds and Thurs) and Lewis Schaffer (Fri). The first two gigs have already sold out. Tickets for the last night available here.