Is the Tide Turning Against Woke Comedy?

Last Thursday I found myself in London for business meetings – a rare trip down from Northumberland. Pre-lockdown, I would usually be in London on a weekly basis, but these days the reasons to travel are few and far between. In that time I have noticed how much the city has changed since 2019. But last week I saw a change that I would never have anticipated.

Friends very generously invited me to join them at the Ealing Comedy Festival’s opening night. The festival takes place in a big top in a park in Ealing and, judging by the line-up of national and some international stars, appears to be a warm up for London-based comics heading to Edinburgh in August.

I had some trepidation: the enforcement of Left-wing political correctness in comedy has damaged comedy and comedians in this country. Truly subversive satirists like Leo Kearse have built sizeable audiences online thanks to the sterling work of the Comedy Unleashed club and its commitment to freedom of expression. Meanwhile, any comic who dared poke fun at Left-wing shibboleths over the last five years has been cancelled – the always shocking Jerry Sadowitz being binned from the Edinburgh Fringe, a festival he has contributed to hugely over the last 30 years.

The line up: Judi Love, Andy Parsons, Sam Campbell, Jo Caufield, Paul Sinah and Mark Watson, hosted by Stephen K. Amos. I was expecting a dose of BBC-approved political humour and activist speeches disguised as comedy from some of them but I was pleasantly surprised.

In front of a crowd of about 1,500 West Londoners, Amos did a superb job of pulling the crowd together and warming them up with a combination of self-deprecation, poking light fun at the crowd, observational humour and stories of his childhood and visits to Nigeria. He was followed by Watson, Love, Campbell, Sinah, Parsons and Caulfield. With the possible exception of Amos and Love, Andy Parsons was the most recognisable comedian that night as a firm fixture on mainstream TV and radio, at least to a layman of the art like myself, and appeared to be the headliner. The first two thirds of the show was great. The performers limited their sets to observational humour, long-form jokes and what my mum would call ‘old fashioned fun’. The result was that by the time we broke for the second interval after Sinah, the crowd were unified in their mirth and having a great time.

And then Andy Parsons came on.

And he bombed – or at least came as close as a stand-up comic of his stature could come to bombing in front of a ‘home’ crowd. His set: blah blah blah… Trump…blah blah blah… orange… blah blah blah… Boris… blah blah blah… Truss… blah blah blah… Farage… blah blah blah… Reform… was as lazy as it was dated.

The response: lukewarm applause and a lot of folded arms and staring at shoes. Apart from a very few loud claps and cheers from an obviously activist group, the rest of the crowd seemed to respond with a combination of hostility, resentment and disapproval.

The atmosphere went from buoyant to chilly within minutes, with many of the crowd clearly not happy with the set. There was also a feeling of resentment that he had decided to wreck the party by covering divisive subjects even among those who broadly agreed with him. It was fascinating to observe that many clearly didn’t agree with him and did not feel compelled to cheer along with what seemed to be more of a reiteration of a creed than a comedy set. I suspect that many, even in that West London professional crowd, may never have agreed with his politics but the difference now is that they’re no longer hiding it.

By the time he left the stage to muted, polite applause, the atmosphere in the tent was more akin to a wake than the high it had been 10 minutes earlier. I turned to the man I was sitting next to, part of a double-couple of professional types in their 50s, and he shook his head and muttered: “When are these people going to give it a rest? Can he not see that the country is in trouble?”

Fortunately, Jo Caulfield had the skill, charm and material to get the night back on course with stories about her somewhat traditional Scottish husband. (As a traditional Scottish husband myself, this was genius observational humour!) So the crowd went home in good spirits.

At the post mortem drink, the general consensus was incredulity at Parson’s inability to read either the room or the nation:

“Why would you go out of your way to piss off half your audience?”

“Is he stuck in the past or something? Jokes about Boris and Truss… and Brexit was ten years ago now.”

“Can we not leave the politics alone for a couple of hours and just have a laugh?”

“This felt like sneering, there are a lot of people who are voting for Reform because they have been let down by the class Andy represents.”

“Trump seems to be doing okay, if you spend five minutes reading beyond the Guardian and BBC.”

Had Parsons pulled a routine like this in Newcastle or Epping he may well have been lynched. That the best he could raise was polite but muted applause from about half of a West London professional crowd spoke volumes about how the mood has shifted in the nation in the space of under a year. With all these comics heading up to the Edinburgh Fringe next week, one wonders if Mr Parsons is frantically writing new material?

C.J. Strachan is the pseudonym of a concerned Scot who worked for 30 years as a Human Resources executive in some of the UK’s leading organisations. Subscribe to his Substack page.