“Comedy has become very speech-policing, very ‘woke’. I can’t get on board with that”

Andrew Lawrence, UK comedy’s foremost contrarian, takes a break from all the controversy in this new show.

No politics. No religion. No smut. No swearing. Just great jokes and good clean fun.

“Master of dark humour and a political provocateur in recent years, Clean sees stand-up Andrew Lawrence remind audiences of his ability to write and deliver clean, non-partisan humour just as well any other comic.”
British Comedy Guide

“Lawrence’s material is dark and deeply self-deprecating, bitter and somehow managing to be both biting and tongue-in-cheek (…) juggling shock, disgust, outrage and laughter (…) He has, he tells us, always regarded comedy as a barometer for freedom of speech. If it is then we are heading into a deep depression.” The Scotsman

Here’s Andrew to explain the new direction.

“No politics. No religion. No smut. No swearing. Just great jokes and good clean fun.” So, tell us the thinking behind this change of direction for you.
Well, in truth I’d had four or five years of sustained criticism by a few very politicised sections of the comedy industry, for the dark comedy I’d been doing since I started in 2003. I was spending far too much time fielding personal abuse and being forced to defend and justify creative choices I was making.
I was exhausted by that and I wanted to get away from it, to escape from those odd people who are so desperate to stamp their moral agenda on comedy. I wanted to just get on with coming up with jokes, and just filling a room with laughter.
Cleaning things up, censoring myself temporarily was the only way to get all those strange zealots off my back. When you give those people nothing to react against, they have to find someone else to go and pretend to be outraged about, they have to go and create another monster to bounce their hysteria off of. But it was only meant as respite: the intention is that I go back to doing the very dark stuff I’ve always done. Because that’s the stuff that makes me laugh the most and also often what audiences find most funny in general.

The key thing for me was: no politics. I think people are aware that the stand-up industry has become very moralising, very speech-policing, very ‘woke’. Personally, I can’t get on board with that, and I’ve found that if you try to make jokes that don’t conform to that orthodoxy, you start getting black-listed by venues and clubs and frozen out by the industry in general. You can’t keep poking fun at that culture when their response is to go out of their way to damage your livelihood.
So, Clean is an act of self-preservation. It’s just a show full of the funniest material I could come up with, where I’m aiming to fill the room with laughter. At the same time, it’s my little message to the industry to say that I don’t want anything to do with the political agenda that’s in play at the moment. I don’t have much respect for the current culture of holding comedians’ jokes up to intensive moral scrutiny. I’m not interested in being anyone’s role model. I got into stand-up to make people laugh, that’s all I care about professionally.

What would you say to your audiences who’ll be wanting more of the usual from you? Will there be as much for them in this show?
It’ll be an all-new show of material that they haven’t seen. I think anyone’s who’s come to one of my gigs before knows that they’re in safe hands and that they’re going to be getting a really funny show. I’ve been doing stand-up for a long time, lots of TV, lots of radio, I’ve won or been nominated for all the awards. I headlined all the clubs and built my own tour following.
Nobody will be going away disappointed.

You talk in this show about comedy as a barometer for free speech. Tell us more. And how is that barometer looking at the moment?
As a comedian at the moment you’re forced to exercise caution. In the current climate, if you say the wrong thing, you can lose your career. I think that’s bad for comedy.
The funniest comedy takes risks. The best comedians in the past have pushed the sort of jokes they tell on stage to the edge of what’s permissible – and they’ve been rewarded for that audacity with big laughs. In the past, the worst that could happen if you got it wrong, is that you might have a bad gig. Now, one ill-judged joke can end your career.
So comedians these days play it very safe, which is a shame, but also a symptom of a wider culture warped by parochial moral conceptions of what you can and can’t joke about generally. On stage at a comedy gig, you should be able to joke about anything. That’s why comedy gigs exist in the first place. They’re a release valve for all the things we’re not allowed to say in real life.
In a comedy club, on stage, the intention is always to create laughter – but there are no rules. Literally none. And there is no science to it. It’s instinctive. Funny only happens in the moment people laugh. As soon as someone starts laying down a set of rules for comedians, the funniest thing you can do as a comic is to break them.

Your onstage character has, until now, been fairly dark, misanthropic, self-loathing. Is that the real you? Or is Clean the real you?
It’s all me, all the time, telling the funniest jokes I can come up with and trying to fill a room with laughter. That’s all there is to it. I just want people who come along to my gigs to have a great night out. I’m not interested in being part of this ‘woke’ movement in comedy that’s preoccupied with forcing some dubious moral and political agenda down people’s throats.
I find it crass and patronising in all honesty. Worse than that, it’s humourless – which is of course the worst thing you can be in comedy.

Andrew Lawrence brings Clean to the Wardrobe Theatre on Apr 24. For more info, visit chucklebusters.com/events/andrew-lawrence-clean