Andrew Lawrence has some claim to being Britain’s most-cancelled comedian. For more than a decade now, the 37-year-old stand-up has been losing himself work, friends and representation due to his wilfully offensive style of comedy / commentary.
In a 2014 Facebook post, he took aim at BBC panel shows on which ‘aging, balding, fat men, ethnic comedians and women-posing-as-comedians, sit congratulating themselves on how enlightened they are about the fact that Ukip are ridiculous and pathetic’.
It is facile, censorious and philistine for comedy clubs to treat jokes as if they are straightforwardly sincere statements and no-platform comedians because they are offensive
After England’s Euros penalties defeat in 2021 he wrote on Twitter: ‘All I’m saying is, the white guys scored.’ Given the tournament began with a row over England players taking the knee and ended with a moral panic about racist England fans abusing black players online (when the posts predominantly came from overseas), his timing couldn’t have been more explosive. That missive lost him his agent and a string of shows.
Now Lawrence has gone after the Scousers, with an (over)dose of gallows humour in the wake of the horrific car attack in Liverpool on Monday. ‘To be fair, if I was in Liverpool, I’d drive through crowds of people to get the fuck out of there as well’, he tweeted.
So far, this has cost Lawrence an upcoming gig in Southend and an indefinite ban from both the Hot Water Comedy Club in Liverpool and the Comedy Store, which has venues in London and Manchester. ‘His brand of cruelty has no place in the kind of comedy we stand for’, said Hot Water in a loftily worded statement.
For his part, Lawrence has posted a video to his YouTube channel, doubling down and then some – blasting Liverpudlians for talking about a car accident as if it is the Holocaust and for failing to understand what a joke is, probably on account of them being illiterate.
Rough stuff, for sure. But that’s what you get with Andrew Lawrence – a comic for whom it is never quite clear where his dark, nihilistic, blood-spitting comedy persona ends and his own view of the world begins.
After his 2014 media storm, Lawrence felt moved to clarify that his ‘ethnic comedians and women-posing-as-comedians’ jibe was about tokenism, and how quotas give a leg-up to comics who aren’t yet ready for the big time, thus perpetuating the ‘myth’ that certain groups aren’t funny.
After his more recent controversies, he has preferred to neither clarify nor apologise – insisting that if people don’t get his humour there is no helping them.
People are well within their rights to find Lawrence’s stuff unpleasant, dodgy, or ‘too soon’. They don’t have to attend his shows. To be frank, if they’d rather not support him, they probably shouldn’t be giving him the publicity.
But it is facile, censorious and philistine for comedy clubs to treat jokes as if they are straightforwardly sincere statements and no-platform comedians because they are offensive. Down this road lies precisely the panel-show mediocrity that Lawrence inelegantly inveighed against all those years ago.
I cannot see into Lawrence’s soul. Nor am I particularly interested in doing so. But just as I don’t think we should assume Frankie Boyle is revealing something about himself when he jokes about raping Holly Willoughby, I don’t think Lawrence’s tweets about black footballers and Liverpool can be taken totally seriously, either.
A joke is a joke. Everything else is execution and personal taste. That goes for sick humour, gallows humour, and apparently ‘problematic’ humour. You don’t have to like it. But the point at which a comic is silenced is the point at which all of us should stop laughing.
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