Kicked out of the Comedy Club

Kicked out of the Comedy Club | Andrew Doyle

"Titania’s fame quickly grew, and by May last year she had more than half a million followers and a second book deal. As her popularity increased, the venom of those who disapproved of the character became more toxic. For some reason these tended to be the very kind of identity-obsessed faux-leftists that Titania was satirising, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence. 

Having been revealed as the author, most of this venom was now channelled in my direction. The extent of the abuse was often unfathomable, and some even went so far as to send direct threats of violence. It’s a curiosity of our times that the most vicious and bullying online behaviour tends to be exhibited by those who claim to be on the side of empathy and compassion. 

I have never quite understood the kind of anger that comedy and satire can provoke. As someone who has seen my fair share of stand-up, I have often found that the best response to a joke that does not amuse me is simply not to laugh. It would never occur to me to berate other members of the audience for their poor taste, or to take to social media and complain about the comedian in question. As someone who does not suffer from narcissistic personality disorder, I am well aware that my personal sense of humour is not the benchmark for the entirety of humankind. When it comes to comedy criticism, “that’s not funny” is about as insightful as “that’s not erotic”. Try telling a fetishist that studded PVC nuns’ habits are objectively devoid of sexual appeal, and he will probably be able to show you some homemade videos that will quickly prove you wrong. 

It is of course entirely natural to feel displeasure when one’s worldview is being ridiculed. I do not blame the poor writer for the Observer who suggested that copies of Titania’s first book would be given to every person in Hell, and that “lampooning the language of social justice is a cheap shot”. I have some sympathy for her position. If I were absorbed in an ideology that mistrusts humour and perceives that jokes have the potential to “normalise hate”, I would doubtless be similarly vexed by anyone who had the temerity to mock it. But that’s the trouble with religious belief. However important it seems to one’s sense of personal identity, there is no way to protect our icons from desecration by unbelievers.

Inevitably, the rage that Titania seemed to provoke merely enhanced the value of the character and confirmed that she was hitting the right targets. I am instinctively non-confrontational, and so was ill-equipped to deal with the sudden way I was being mischaracterised by strangers on the internet who perceived me as an “edgelord”: one who causes offence for its own sake. I had spent the previous three years writing an online character that almost exclusively ridiculed the political right, and in my stand-up had poked fun at all political parties, but now that I was turning my attention to the social justice left I was apparently taking things too far. I think it was when someone suggested that it would be best if I perished in a volcano that I suspected matters were spiralling out of control. 

The reaction of the “comedy community” — if such a thing exists — was particularly revealing. Suddenly, comics I had known and worked with for years began to block me on social media, or write blog posts to express their displeasure at my diabolical creation. Those who knew me to be fundamentally opposed to racial discrimination started referring to me as “alt-right”, a shorthand term for white nationalist. Others accused me of being a shill for foreign powers and claimed that I was being funded by “dark money”. I remember thinking that this money must be very dark indeed, given that I have never actually seen any of it...

When I approached old friends from the circuit to catch up, they would look around nervously. At first I assumed this was my own paranoia, brought on by the unbridled consumption of cheap prosecco, but then a companion of mine made the same observation. These people I had been acquainted with for years, who knew me to be a decent person, were nonetheless clearly now afraid of being spotted in my vicinity. 

What are we to conclude from this? It would take considerable comedic illiteracy to interpret Titania as “punching down” at minority groups, and I like to think that most stand-ups are familiar with how satire works. I can accept such misapprehensions from writers for the Guardian or the New Statesman, but that’s because these publications probably weed out anyone with a sense of humour at the interview stage. Comedians, on the other hand, are rarely successful if they are unfamiliar with the concept of levity.

As I’ve explained more times than I care to remember, the driving force behind Titania is my contempt for bullies. She’s an exercise in punching up at the predominantly middle-class woke authoritarians who patronise and demean minorities while claiming to defend them. This is why she describes herself as being “brave enough to stand up for the rights of minorities, even when they don’t know what’s best for themselves”. She embodies the kind of intolerant and illiberal activism that has been responsible for the rise of “cancel culture”, a retributive system of public shaming which is routinely denied by its own practitioners. 

It is simply not true that in order to “punch up” one must exclusively take aim at those in positions of political power. Cultural hegemony (to borrow one of Titania’s favourite buzzwords) manifests itself in multiple ways. Even our current Conservative government is subject to ideological pressure to conform to the high priests of identity politics who prevail in all our major artistic, educational and law enforcement institutions.

A friend of mine explained the truth of it quite bluntly. He described how he had found himself defending me in a comedy club green room, after a group of comics were smearing me as “fascist-adjacent” or some such nonsense. As he put it, the insults struck him as performative, not dissimilar to how bullies at school will happily manufacture false reputations for their targets in order to justify their attacks. 

It doesn’t matter to these comics that the accusations are untrue; it only matters that they are seen to be opposed to the pariah in their midst. This is a matter of self-preservation in an industry which is hostile to anyone who does not toe the ideological line. It’s as good a theory as any, I suppose.

In her speech launching the 2018 Edinburgh Fringe, Nica Burns (director of the festival’s comedy awards) had said that she was “looking forward to comedy’s future in the woke world” and that “the woke movement” was now “setting an ever-evolving agenda as it seeks to establish a clear marker for what is unacceptable today”. 

At the time, some people told me that they had found this troubling. Here was one of the most influential figures in the industry proclaiming her fealty to an ideology that is fundamentally opposed to freedom of speech, and sees artistic expression in terms of how it perpetuates “power structure” in society. Tellingly, none of those who shared their concerns were willing to do so publicly.

This is why I have such sympathy for those free-thinking young comics whose instinct is to take risks and puncture the prevailing orthodoxies. While the industry remains systemically woke, they will always be likely to self-censor rather than risk scuppering their career before it has even begun. I have seen first-hand how this trend has developed over the past few years.

Until recently I was running a course on stand-up for aspiring young comedians...

I only ran the course for six years, but during that time there was an undeniable shift in how these young comics perceived their craft. Cultural developments are typically imperceptible, yet here I could see evidence of the sea change with each term’s new cohort. Discussions about limitations in comedy became increasingly fraught, with more and more participants pushing back against the notion that their peers ought to be able to joke about anything. By the end of my time at the theatre, there were members of the group who seemed intent on policing the material of others and assessing its moral quality. One even boasted about how she had taken to attending open mic nights in order to castigate comics who had offended her sensibilities. It was as though one of the Pharisees of the New Testament had been reincarnated in teenage form. 

I lost the job because of Titania. Apparently, one of her tweets had made a member of the group feel “unsafe”, and so the theatre felt they could not renew my contract. This is the reality of working in comedy in the current climate. Still, by this point I had other sources of income and was only really continuing out of a sense of loyalty to the theatre. Their failure to defend artistic freedom in the face of palpably disingenuous appeals to “safety” was disappointing, but really it’s just the latest in a series of relationships that have become impossible to sustain due to a fictional character that I created. It does seem strange that we should have reached this point, but such is the inanity of the identitarian left’s ongoing culture war...

I have always acknowledged that sometimes the best artists are morally bereft, and yet my mistake was assuming that comedians should be any different. In his memoir Looking Back (1933), Norman Douglas writes that humanity can be divided into two camps: “gentlemen” and “cads”. Gentlemen are “those who value human relationships” and cads are “those who value social or financial advancement”. I have learnt in recent years that, with a few honourable exceptions, comedians are cads. Maybe that’s an inevitable feature of an essentially self-regarding form of artistic expression, but I’m happy to say that getting kicked out of this club isn’t so much a snub as a relief. "