In this episode of Trigonometry, Francis Foster and Constantine Kishan are joined by comedian Simon Evans to discuss the controversial Joe Brand milk shake scandal, and how comedians should be able to cross the line when it comes to what is and isn't OK to say.
00:01:49.200There's been an article recently that came out about that.
00:01:52.240There's lots of discussion about free speech.
00:01:54.180One of the biggest stories I think that's happened recently has been the Joe Brand case.
00:01:58.340And for anyone who doesn't know, Joe Brand made the joke about how instead of milk-shaking, I don't know if she said far right, but politicians that she didn't agree with, what we should do instead is throw a battery asset.
00:02:11.020And she was saying this as part of a comedy performance on a comedy program.
00:02:14.660But I think a lot of the stuff that came out of that, and I talked about it, was the double standards of left versus right,
00:02:21.100freedom of speech for comedians, freedom of speech in general, the ability to make jokes.
00:02:26.780Well, there were a number of salient factors.
00:02:28.300I think the most obvious one to say is that, yes, of course, it was a joke.
00:02:32.600But I think it was a joke which, on a moment's reflection, you would see was probably not an appropriate thing to broadcast on Radio 4
00:02:38.760at a point where tensions were very high.
00:02:41.520And I think half the reason that milkshaking is such an effective tool is because it arouses a brief moment of panic in the victim when they don't know what's been thrown at them, you know.
00:02:49.800And I think people live in genuine fear of being attacked by something more serious.
00:02:54.300So I think a moment's reflection would have made anyone realise that it wasn't an appropriate thing to broadcast.
00:02:58.860And that moment should have then been grasped by the various, you know, rafts of authority and editing processes and the producers and so on who would have mediated between Joe saying it and the audience laughing, but a little nervously, I think, and a sort of 24 hour gap, at least before it was broadcast.
00:03:14.720So I certainly don't blame Joe Brand at all for a misjudgment or an error of taste or
00:03:21.600whatever, because as I think we've all discussed before now, if you're to be able to function
00:03:25.780as a comedian, you'll have to be able to cross the line, realize you've crossed it and retreat
00:03:29.760without having your career in tatters, you know, without having a police investigation.
00:03:33.740People refer to edgy comedians, perhaps without really considering what the word means.
00:03:38.180Well, for me, it means the edge of what is acceptable and you transgress it occasionally
00:03:42.080And you play with it. Even if you just do a live gig in front of a comedy club audience, every comedian is always pushing up to see where their where their collective edge is.
00:03:51.120And one or two people will feel you've crossed it at any given point. And then you come back.
00:03:55.020And for some people, you know, making a joke at the expense of, let's say, Down syndrome will be something that's beyond the pale and they just won't accept it.
00:04:02.840Frankie Boyle got into trouble with a joke like that a few years ago, having done other material in which he quite literally, you know, decapitates politicians and vomits into their writhing trunks, you know.
00:04:12.980So you just go, what is, you know, what is always not acceptable in these situations?
00:04:17.920So it's not necessarily, I don't think it should be imposed on Joe Brand.
00:04:22.100But having said all that, there was a tiny bit of schadenfreude that I enjoyed in seeing her held up to account because she herself has called other people on that kind of stuff.
00:04:33.900You know, she famously had Carol Thatcher essentially, you know, blackballed from any further employment prospects at the BBC after an off the cuff remark she made, you know, in the green room.
00:04:45.360I think a slightly old-fashioned and misjudged joke that she made, but it wasn't. I don't think
00:04:51.880it was fueled by hate or any sort of vicious racism or anything. Well, Joe Brand reported
00:04:56.420that. Carol Thatcher never worked again, whether or whether that was not intended as revenge for
00:05:02.780Joe Brand's quite open loathing for her mother, for Margaret Thatcher. I don't know, but it seemed
00:05:08.400to be an extraordinary coincidence if it wasn't. And then she quite recently scolded Ian Hislop,
00:05:13.940of course, live on Have I Got News For You, when Hislop was essentially chortling at the notion
00:05:20.440that a bit of a sort of clumsy knee grope in the Commons canteen was on the same level of Me Too
00:05:26.960horror story, you know, as the Weinstein revelations and so on. It was all being collected
00:05:32.680under the hashtag Me Too. I think a journalist, I can't remember if it was a journalist, you know,
00:05:37.680attempted to grope an MP or vice versa. It was Julie Hartley Brewer.
00:05:40.480right. Okay. Yeah. So, and it wasn't, you know, it was, it wasn't like he wasn't saying it doesn't
00:05:45.720matter, but he was kind of joking. It's not really quite on the same level as these Hollywood
00:05:49.720revelations. And Joe delivered this kind of minute long monologue telling him that this
00:05:54.360kind of thing just wears you down and got a round of applause. But essentially she was policing his
00:05:59.020sense of humor and his sense of proportion and telling him, no, this matters. Well, that's all
00:06:03.720that everyone else has done. A lot of other people have then policed Joe and go, no, sorry.
00:06:07.380but when you are a public figure you do live in fear now of a serious assault on the street and
00:06:12.640this kind of thing doesn't help and if it had been the left who had been given an opportunity
00:06:18.980to castigate a right-wing comedian for joking about something they would immediately have
00:06:23.980you know brought up Joe Cox murder and so on as indications of exactly why these kind of things
00:06:29.800are not to be joked about so I think there has been a huge amount of hypocrisy but none of it
00:11:17.140I sort of was following the debate at the time.
00:11:19.180And if I remember correctly, she was he felt that she was sort of minimizing and trivializing and laughing off the notion that men's sexual health, men's threats that men face and so on need the same sort of level of protection as women or whatever.
00:11:35.660And in that context, he obviously felt that the heat was already raised and that this was the heat, the level at which a response like that was appropriate, whereas obviously just kind of out of the blue and out of nowhere, it wouldn't be.
00:11:47.260Context is kind of everything in these things.
00:11:49.280And of course, it's the first casualty of war.
00:12:07.360In front of the Radio 4 audience, that's orthodoxy.
00:12:09.520The idea that Nigel Farage literally deserves to have life-changing injuries is Radio 4 comedy orthodoxy.
00:12:15.520That is, that's as straight down the line as you can get, you know, to have said on heresy,
00:12:21.020I don't know, I quite like Nigel Farage, you know, he looks like he'd be a nice bloke to have a pint
00:12:24.540with, you know, that would be heresy. You could have told immediately from the audience reaction,
00:12:29.340I suspect, that you had now transgressed, seriously, but you won't get that.
00:12:33.600No, because you'll never get booked again. But I was going to say, do you think there is a bias
00:12:39.020in comedy, Simon, with, you know, left-leaning liberal comedians getting the majority of the
00:12:44.520airwaves? There are all sorts of different aspects of that question. I do think that the BBC
00:12:50.900struggles to find even centrist comedians, I would say. I mean, I don't expect to see
00:12:57.100right wing like the kind of old fashioned, you know, Jim Davison or whatever, right wing or the
00:13:01.640sensibilities and the subtext, you know, that you might call racist or whatever,
00:13:06.240underlying those kind of jokes. But they struggle to find anyone who challenges the,
00:13:11.620I guess, the kind of campus politics that seem to dominate the fringes now.
00:13:17.140In a different context, on social media, where I spend far too much time on Twitter,
00:13:20.720it's obviously part of the whole proposition of Twitter and the whole dynamics and the
00:13:26.080algorithms and everything that drives everything to the extremes because nobody's interested in
00:13:30.860a moderate view. People are far more likely to click and repeat and respond and retweet
00:13:34.440to anyone kind of going, you know, I'm insanely mad, you know, this violation of my rights, you
00:13:41.660know, and or completely poo-pooing them. And it does seem to me that comedy is not, you know,
00:13:48.560the world of comedy is not reflecting both sides of that argument at the moment, you know. So to
00:13:52.340the extent that these arguments are taking place on the fringes at all, there is an awful lot of
00:13:56.420comedy which doesn't concern itself with these sort of things at all, you know, and that's fine.
00:14:00.640But it is interesting, for instance, and this is not a slam dunk argument, but just one kind of symptom.
00:14:06.980Mock the weak, traditionally. You'll have six comedians on there, Dara O'Brien.
00:14:12.080I know, for instance, I hope they won't mind me saying so.
00:14:15.360Gary Delaney, for instance, is at least centrist.
00:14:18.180I would say a little bit right to center with his politics and is quite interested in libertarian ideas.
00:14:22.540He's quite interested in investing in gold because he believes that fiat currency is potentially very fragile.
00:14:27.300Big fan of the show, by the way, Gary. How are you doing, mate?
00:14:29.400So he has those ideas, you know. He won't do any of that on Mock the Week. He just does terrific. His puns, his jokes are fantastic. And that is his stock in trade. But none of them have that subtext. They are all just kind of, you know, like kind of slightly off colour references to sexual piccadillos or whatever.
00:14:51.660He's a very intelligent, interesting guy in real life.
00:14:54.420But the character he plays on Mock the Week and on stage is, again, basically about one-liners that are of a craziness.
00:15:00.560Whereas the left-leaning comedians, if you get somebody on there like Chris Addison or whatever, when he used to do it,
00:15:07.500you know, who are able to kind of basically use that platform to undermine the notion that UKIP
00:15:15.100is a remotely sort of, you know, prior to Brexit, that that was a remotely feasible proposition,
00:15:22.420are quite comfortable in expressing their views. So there's a bias to that extent. I'm not saying
00:15:26.820that there are no right-wing comedians, but the extent to which they feel their natural liberty,
00:15:31.540that they feel that their license is granted to express those views. And that, of course,
00:15:36.600then drives the audience in a certain direction and audiences and it's not I don't think insulting
00:15:41.420to audiences to say this it's just you can be part of this audience yourself but the dynamics of
00:15:46.880audiences are that they coalesce into a single body I mean that's sort of what the job of the
00:15:50.360compare is in a comedy club is to kind of get them into a herd-like format if every if every
00:15:54.900audience if every audience is thinking for themselves you have to have that because if
00:16:00.860every audience is thinking for themselves independently is that funny making a decision
00:16:04.420And then, you know, it becomes very choppy, you know, and you do get heckling, of course, at that point, because people feel quite capable of speaking against the grain of the crowd.
00:16:12.600So you need that. And of course, if the audience is being, you know, driven along, you know, the droveway in a certain direction and then one comedian stands up and goes, no, that way, you know, you don't get the same laugh because you're not keeping the flywheel spinning.
00:16:27.640You're putting a spanner in the works. And that's a very different dynamic in any. It can be exciting, you know.
00:16:32.820And if you're a terrific comedian, if you were a George Carlin and you were invited onto that show and you had the confidence and the vocabulary to, you know, expose the political orthodoxies and the callowness of the views being, you know, expressed for what they are, then you could potentially create, you know, milestone television.
00:16:53.440But the chances are it will just, everyone will go, what?
00:17:22.880But the number of laughs per minute you get on a show like Mock the Week sort of almost killed the sitcom flat, really.
00:17:29.880You know, those, you know, they were very, very, very funny.
00:17:32.780You know, you get and of course, then all those comedians bantering among each other creates a sort of nice.
00:17:38.820You kind of want to be part of that gang, you know, so that's what that show is for.
00:17:42.180It's not that show's job to challenge or even though it might like to wear the clothes of like, you know, something that you know, that is the job.
00:17:51.480But yes, to be a George Carlin, you know, to really stand up and tear down all the sacred idols, not just those of the right or the left.
00:18:00.120You know, he was every bit as much an enemy of the sacred idols of the left.
00:18:04.940You know, a lot of his took that many of his famous quotation, was it political correctness, his fascism, pretending to be politeness, something like that.
00:18:13.140You know, he was quite on it the whole time.
00:18:17.140But nowadays, the opportunities to get in front of an audience and say that kind of stuff are fewer.
00:18:24.500Somebody like Stuart Lee has his, you know, those shows were tremendous in which he unpacks a lot of the subtext of a Richard Littlejohn article or whatever.
00:18:33.780You know, that's very effective. And he's a very good comedian. He's a very intelligent guy.
00:18:37.220And he takes his time and he trusts the audience to come with him on a journey.
00:18:40.920And I don't want to see the back of him by any means. I just think it would be quite useful to have the right wing equivalent of that.
00:18:46.100But there is a sort of presumption now, partly, I think, to be honest, you know, reinforced by things that Stuart Lear said, you know, that it's not it just couldn't be that there is no I couldn't have a right wing intelligent comment, you know, because because the right wing is the voice of privilege and the voice of power.
00:19:05.060and say, well, that's just nonsense. It isn't at all. The right wing can be the voice of
00:19:08.140tradition who are being trammeled at the moment. Traditions are being obliterated. Anyone,
00:19:14.040for instance, who has a traditional view of gender, sex, and what it is to be a man or a
00:19:18.860woman, their views are currently literally unsayable on the BBC. You can actually be
00:19:24.340held up and arraigned in the court of public opinion for having the view that a man is a
00:19:31.900biological man. Now, that is a traditional point of view. And whether or not it's right or not,
00:19:36.520it's a point of view which somebody should be able to express without feeling anxious,
00:19:40.660I would have thought, you know, and yet and that is no longer the case. So having
00:19:44.860the idea that the right wing comedian is essentially the voice of the bankers,
00:19:51.700that's just nonsense. You know, that isn't what right wing comedy is. Right wing comedy can be
00:19:55.560any number of things. It could be like expressing the views of GK Chesterton, you know, or expressing
00:20:00.160the views of Rajal Kipling, you know, these kind of, and these people were very funny,
00:20:04.780you know, but they essentially had a tragic view of the essence of human nature as fundamentally
00:20:09.700unsavable and, you know, progress being necessarily contingent to some extent.
00:20:16.540But increasingly now as well, it could just be the voice of the socially conservative
00:20:20.540people, which is working class people.
00:20:54.480He's probably, I guess it's that old grid, isn't it?
00:20:57.520And so in economic terms, he's probably still on the, you know, the old traditional, you know,
00:21:02.320my old man's a dustman, that kind of mentality, basically, who have been abandoned, of course,
00:21:06.620if you look on that grid and how the MPs in the House of Commons, they are all in that,
00:21:11.280in the quarter from sort of midday around to 9pm. Nobody is in that top left quarter,
00:21:16.500which is like left wing fiscally, but socially conservative. And that is a huge,
00:21:21.240a massive slice of the British public who have felt neglected and arguably voted for Brexit just
00:21:29.320to express their discontent with the status quo, you know, regardless of whether they felt they'd
00:21:34.780properly identified its root. And voted Brexit party in the EU elections and you get Labour
00:21:39.740voters turn around and calling them racist. But anyway. Yeah. Well, this is Labour's massive
00:21:43.720problem now, isn't it? Of course, the Tories have massive problems too, but Labour's massive
00:21:47.060problem is that they're trying to split between those two massively opposing camps. They had,
00:21:52.260in the post-war consensus, managed to combine that to create a coalition of the socially
00:21:56.680conservative and the more sort of intellectual, you know, degree, you know, the credentialism of
00:22:07.680like left-wing thought, you know, that has different views and wants to lift oppression
00:22:13.920from increasingly more sort of narrowly defined intersectional groups.
00:22:18.740So what we're talking about is very, very interesting because, you know, we're saying
00:22:23.500that there's no figure on the right. And do you think it's because comedians self-centred
00:22:27.940because they go, if I'm actually going to be honest about what I think and what I believe,
00:22:32.060my career will be stunted and curtailed as a result?
00:22:35.220I think it's perfectly conceivable that such a comedian exists. Yes. I don't know how often,
00:22:40.620how many, and part of the problem is, of course, that you don't see them.
00:22:43.100But it might be, of course, that that sort of person is not drawn to comedy now.
00:22:48.300Yeah, they might think I mean, there are plenty of people like yourself who were able to blog, you know, and it's not quite the same as being on live at the Apollo.
00:22:55.020But, you know, you can you can make video content.
00:22:58.960You can make content one way or another. You might sell books.
00:23:01.460You look at Andrew Doyle, for instance, he's written that book.
00:23:03.500Titania McGrath has become an Internet sensation and he's sold a lot of books.
00:23:07.540You know, again, he probably won't get the same sort of TV coverage, you know, but he certainly angered the left.
00:23:12.680you know, some of them are furious. There's a guy, the assistant editor of the New Statesman,
00:23:16.540I think, who's John Elledge. No, not George Eaton, but John Elledge. I might have his job title
00:23:20.860wrong, but fairly senior figure there, who said, I will block anyone who retweets that account.
00:23:25.800You know, and he wasn't joking. I mean, he sounded like absurdly, you might say snowflake,
00:23:29.580but he is basically threatening people with losing access to a senior figure in the political
00:23:35.620journalist, you know, of sphere because they've retweeted a comedy account, which is taking the
00:23:39.780piss out of left-wing orthodoxy. So he's obviously, you know, he's riled some people, which is great,
00:23:44.320but that's not, he would go down that route, you know. And there are lots of other things you could
00:23:48.000do as well, of course. And other people might say, you know, yes, the right wing, you know,
00:23:51.360they are, they're not struggling as much as you think. And you have this whole intellectual dark
00:23:55.060web thing, which is a hilarious, very interesting. I mean, I've been following Jordan Peterson for
00:23:59.720many years, and I think he's a tremendous live speaker, really compelling, because he's,
00:24:03.660he's thinking in real time, and he's addressing real problems and trying to use his intelligence
00:24:07.640and his store of knowledge to produce coherent answers to real questions, you know, that I find
00:24:13.940interesting in itself. It's not necessarily because he's, you know, I didn't even really
00:24:17.660register that he was that conservative, really, to begin with, but I see it now. But some of the
00:24:21.860people that gathered around him, I think, are more opportunists. Dave Rubin, for instance,
00:24:25.820who runs this kind of very successful podcast, very possibly a sort of template for what you
00:24:31.080guys are trying to do here. I mean, he gets like a million hits per show or whatever. It's a very,
00:24:35.000very successful format but i'm not sure whether his heart is quite as much in the in the advancement
00:24:41.040of human knowledge so much as it is in the advancement of day room i love the way that
00:24:45.620simon's laid that out and put us as the template for that listen i wouldn't blame anyone if you
00:24:51.360managed to crack it it was like 10 years ago 20 years ago every british chat show wanted to be
00:24:56.480letterman right yeah jonathan ross wanted to be letterman and eventually sort of basically cracked
00:25:00.500it but for a lot of them went through it and jonathan ross had a couple of misfires as well
00:34:51.600And, you know, I don't think I wouldn't advise my children if they went to university to
00:34:55.340avoid encountering views that they might find challenging.
00:35:00.000But, you know, I might say to them, I might say to my daughter, don't necessarily try and inveigle your way into the rugby club, you know, and because you might find some of their jokes are a bit, you know, disrespectful.
00:35:16.440I think guys are allowed to have a space where there also is a safe space for them to just let off traditional steam.
00:35:22.400If it then gets out of hand, you know, I don't know.
00:35:24.940I mean, I just don't feel like it's for me to police that kind of stuff.
00:45:42.420And this is the number one way of judging comedy now.
00:45:47.320Yes, which requires you to be familiar with intersectional point scoring and league tables and so on.
00:45:52.020But even if you are familiar with them, it strikes me that there's quite a contradiction there.
00:45:55.840Because, for example, a straight white middle class Etonian, old Etonian university educated man.
00:46:03.420Yeah. Punching Doris from Macclesfield.
00:46:06.920Yeah. For being racist for voting Brexit.
00:46:09.660Yeah. That's considered punching up the racist Doris from Macclesfield.
00:46:14.260Yes. Even though on the intersectionality scale, I mean, I don't understand who's more vulnerable than a pensioner.
00:46:21.860Gordon Brown in the back of a cab referring to a bigoted woman. Was that punching up or punching down? It's a good question, isn't it?
00:46:27.200That was almost the question, wasn't it? Yeah. I mean, I was on a Jeff Norcott podcast recently. We talked about this.
00:46:34.500I think it's a I know Chris Rock, I think, originated the phrase to try and explain how he felt comfortable doing it.
00:46:41.360I don't think he ever in turn intended to make this the deep, you know, the metric by which all other comedians are judged.
00:46:49.400But for me, in my routines, I like to present a boxing match.
00:46:54.280That's what I was saying to Jeff. And I said it in real time. And on reflection, I'm sticking with it.
00:46:59.460Like one of my more kind of like my wife refers it to my hate crime material, you know, when I start doing stuff that's like might sound like it was punching down.
00:47:08.240I do a routine. It starts with a joke about three men in a hospital there to collect their babies.
00:47:13.160And there's confusion. And then the punchline is one of those two in there is Welsh and I'm not taking any chances.
00:47:18.720Right. So the joke is at the expense of the Welsh. It's a big relief because the other man in the joke was a Pakistani.
00:47:23.180And so you're going, oh, well, God, at least it wasn't racist.
00:47:26.400So that plays with people. I think it plays with people's sensibilities already because you're going, oh, it's all right because it's the Welsh.
00:47:32.760Then in the course of the kind of aftershocks, because I always think once you've got a good punch line up, you need to kind of like try and, you know, follow it up with the toppers.
00:47:42.120I like to think it swings back and forth.
00:47:44.380You know, I describe interactions I've had with Welsh audiences where I've come off the worst or where I've suddenly woken up to their trenchant hostility towards a middle class Englishman or whatever.
00:48:00.500I'm the victim in one line and then in the next line I come back again, you know.
00:48:04.660And I did the same thing more historically with Geordies.
00:48:08.460Again, there's a kind of, you know, I'm laughing at them.
00:48:11.260And it's, I mean, it's very, the actual basic material is very stereotypical
00:48:16.100that they tend to be indifferent to cold weather.
00:48:19.400That was it, really, that they just don't wear jackets.
00:48:21.740I mean, that's the most root one observation about Geordies.
00:48:23.860But you just stay with it long enough and see if you can't get something new out of it.
00:48:26.880Half the jokes, I hope, were at the expense of my sort of befuddled, slightly Michael Palin-esque, you know, would-be tolerant and, you know, curious traveler in foreign lands trying to understand the culture of these people and treating them as if they were some remote tribe or something, whereas, in fact, they're part of the United Kingdom.
00:49:23.420I would do a joke if I knew that the joke was good. But what will happen if I sense that they're significantly left to my views and are finding this uncomfortable is what will dry up is the little witty off the cuff asides and in the moment toppers and extras, which are actually, that's a real shame because that is what really makes a gig.
00:49:43.580you know those little asides of what why an edinburgh show will start you know on the first
00:49:48.800of august with maybe 30 or 40 good laughs and hopefully have a couple of hundred good laughs
00:49:53.100by the end of it because each time you add a little thing that you think of in the moment you
00:49:56.320know all the good writing happens on stage and if you've got an audience that you feel is hostile
00:50:01.060to your core proposition then you're not going to be doing any good writing on stage unless you
00:50:04.880decide to go fuck you i'm going out in a place of glory but i am not that guy i'm afraid you know
00:50:11.200not generally speaking. I don't want people who pay money to come to a comedy show to
00:50:14.340have their faces ground into my, you know, because I'm not even sure that I'm right.
00:50:19.280Of course, you know, it's all just for a laugh. So yes, you'll try and steer it away to stuff
00:50:22.920that we can all laugh about, you know, but it is a shame if you get that. And sometimes
00:50:26.460only one or two people, again, policing the audience, an audible sharp intake of breath.
00:50:31.920I really detest that because that isn't actually an honest expression of your reaction. It's an
00:50:38.540attempt to stop everyone else enjoying this. Do you want to mean? If you play, if you do an
00:50:44.280audience, for instance, I might do a show, I did one recently in Holmfirth in Yorkshire,
00:50:48.400it went really well. It was absolutely delighted with it. It was like one of the last dates of my
00:50:52.040genius tour, one of the sort of aftershocks. And they were really good audience. But there was
00:50:56.240just one line when I made a joke at the expense of the North South divide and the kind of failure
00:51:02.320of communication. But somebody in the audience sort of attempted to take it as if I was just
00:51:07.480insulting Yorkshire as if I was condescending to Yorkshire you know seriously rather than ironically
00:51:11.940and did that kind of and luckily the rest of the audience went fuck off that was a joke you know
00:51:18.540and it was fine but that's what they were trying to do even if they weren't consciously trying to
00:51:22.300do it that's what that communicates and that does anger me because you know nobody needs that in the
00:51:26.860room you decide for yourself if you don't like a joke that's fine but you start drawing doing those
00:51:32.020things and everyone then starts to feel a little bit oh I better not laugh because they didn't like
00:51:35.520it and i'm not sure now if we're on do what i mean and that that's you know that's that's that
00:51:41.260can be that can like slow you down that can freeze things up and and then you just start to sort of
00:51:46.120run on three cylinders instead of four and it's you you're kind of policing yourself all the time
00:51:50.000and that's no good i was going to ask you the reason i brought up the punching up and punching
00:51:53.820down thing is i think you're someone who is a great example of brilliant comedy that is based
00:51:59.220i mean if you write it down and you read it out in the cold light of a morning breakfast show
00:54:55.340You know, I think that's that's part of what makes the comedy seem very, you know, fertile ground for discussion like this.
00:55:02.860You know, if it was just jokes, there would be nothing to talk about, would it?
00:55:05.400I think that's fine. I think that's OK.
00:55:07.560It's just, you know, overreaction or whatever.
00:55:10.460Or, as I say, the sharp, the audible, sharp intake of breath is what I don't like when people just start going, well, no, if you find that funny, you laugh.
00:55:17.720You don't find it funny. You don't laugh.
00:55:19.040You know, you don't start going to go.
00:55:20.180I did, I had, no, actually, I'm not going to tell that story because somebody, the person
00:55:24.840might, might, go on, Simon, go on, I had lunch with somebody recently and they indicated
00:55:33.820they were a vegetarian, with which I have zero problem, of course, you're talking about
00:55:41.140like, you're talking about the trans lobby, exactly, this was in a restaurant, I wasn't
00:55:44.540expected to cater differently for them or anything, we were all in a restaurant, we were
00:55:47.520all choosing from the menu and the vegetarian made it known really quite seriously that if
00:55:52.460one of the other people were to order something which they felt was really quite a cruel thing
00:55:57.840to eat not just like a you know like a steak and kidney pie they would find that offensive like
00:56:04.500that would be you know not an appropriate thing to eat in front of a vegetarian and that's what
00:56:09.520I think the sharp intake of breath is do you know what I mean that's that's that is crossing a line
00:56:13.420for me i didn't say anything at the time you know and and you know they are a good friend i don't
00:56:18.220know if i want that bit left in the podcast there's no choice now simon okay yeah no we can
00:56:23.780no um well now we have but you know what i mean it's like that kind of that's that's that's wrong
00:56:29.360you shouldn't you shouldn't police other people's attitudes but of course humans will do these
00:56:34.100things and so as a comedian you then have to go in i played early in my life i played the comedy
00:56:38.640store. And there was a woman in the front row. I did an old joke, which I'd done dozens of times
00:56:43.480where I said, my granddad, it was based on actually, but I used to refer to him as my
00:56:48.960neighbor Stan, but he was my granddad's father. But my neighbor Stan, this was a true story about
00:56:54.380him. He used to refer to the next door neighbors as the darkest next door. And I said, which was
00:56:59.040a bit offensive and certainly rather old fashioned, especially considering they're Cornish.
00:57:03.600now in fact they were portuguese which i still felt was a bit you know just amused me that he
00:57:09.160called them the darkies you know even the faintest sort of deviation from anglo-saxon skin tones
00:57:13.900but he was a he was a kind gentle old man you know who was just uh expressing his the views
00:57:19.020of his generation anyway this woman on the front row as soon as i said that she said sharp intake
00:57:24.240of breath audible intake of breath i said what what's the matter and she went i don't like no
00:57:28.600we don't like darky jokes she just heard the word darky and assumed this was a joke about darkies
00:57:34.700you know and about them being a problem or being stupid or something you know not at the expense
00:57:39.260of an old man whose racist views were not only racist they were incoherent and had no you know
00:57:43.520no sort of genetic yeah yeah and that i went into it and took the piss out of that and the audience
00:57:51.040came back but there was a sort of balance you know there was a moment but like i felt i had
00:57:55.920to deal with that because if I'd just gone yeah you're right sorry I shouldn't do oh no you know
00:57:59.680then you've lost your confidence lost your faith you know the whole from out of that would have
00:58:04.060rippled an entire so instead she had to be you know dealt with cruelly this is exactly what I
00:58:10.720was going to ask you final question before we ask the very final question is uh one of your
00:58:15.340probably most known jokes would be jokes about the joke about your eyes yes right which I
00:58:21.460understand you got from a heckler yes at the uh up the creek sunday night at up the creek where it
00:58:27.440used to be uh malcolm hardy's most sort of legendary performances he would you'd have a
00:58:31.280decent act in the first half and a decent act in the final section but in the middle section was
00:58:35.320uh was all open spots and he'd always go cool this one might be good might be shit you know
00:58:40.020there was no there was no attempt to big you up at all and there were a group of guys i think they
00:58:44.200were all cab drivers and they all used to congregate around the sound booth in the back left
00:58:47.840section of the room who were just absolute samurai I mean they were or ninjas I should say they were
00:58:53.800devastating hecklers and they they made or broke a number of careers you know and if you went on
00:58:58.960there without the confidence that you had what it took you know that could be the end of your
00:59:02.400career you know they would dismantle you and that was it but that was the only one he shouted out
00:59:06.020where are your eyes and the whole I had no idea my eyes do disappear in shadow under stage lighting
00:59:12.240in normal conditions they're small but you can see where they are but under stage lights you know
00:59:15.980the angle comes down they just look like yeah like holes like I've been you know gouged and
00:59:22.260everyone laughed and I had no idea why I couldn't get it back from there I'd done about two or three
00:59:26.340minutes it was going all right you know not brilliantly and then that was it and then I
00:59:29.400just sort of shuffled off and then afterwards I was talking to somebody and they said yeah no
00:59:33.220your eyes do disappear maybe and I we agree that I should do that joke I should get in there first
00:59:37.460because then you have a level of self-awareness the audiences love audiences love it that's the
00:59:41.960old so-and-so has let himself go. That's the usual joke, right? Yeah. Egg, out of this life,
00:59:47.640you look a bit like. Have you ever heard that? No, I'm looking for that joke. Tell me, Simon,
00:59:51.780go for it. Egg was a character in This Life, which was an early version of sort of a steadicam,
00:59:56.760single camera, sort of, it was a lovely sort of comedy drama series about people starting out
01:00:02.940their postgraduate lives in London. And Egg was very much a series, sort of a bit of a heartthrob,