Jerry rigged
Jerry Sadowitz has been kidnapped by British press' usual suspects for off-the-peg "cancel culture" columns.
If you relied on comment pieces from The Times and The Daily Telegraph you might end up believing that Jerry Sadowitz only has two jokes: One about Nelson Mandela and Terry Waite from the 80s1 and his greeting from an appearance at Montreal’s Just for Laughs festival in the 90s (“Hello moosefuckers!”2). It’s surely mere coincidence that those two lines are the only ones featured on Sadowitz’s Wikipedia page.
The Daily Telegraph last reviewed Sadowitz in 2011, during the comic’s run at that year’s Edinburgh run and Dominic Cavendish’s positive review began:
It’s not nice, it’s not pleasant, it features an expletive roughly every 10 seconds and more racist remarks than an after-dinner speech at a BNP rally…
The Times covered him more recently with a review of his 2019 appearance at the Leicester Square Theatre. Dominic Maxwell gave the performance two stars out of five and concluded:
… while there is greatness to what he does, its ugliness needs a clearer sense of purpose if a mixed audience is to accept it as playful rather than horrible. I’m not saying “ban this filth”; time to focus this filth, though.
The Guardian reviewed Sadowitz’s magic show in 2017 but the last time it covered one of his standup performances was in 2012; a three-star review limited to three paragraphs. Brian Logan wrote that he “laughed lots during the first 20 minutes of [the] show… [with] no time to interrogate — far less to justify — why”, concluding:
It's horribly funny to have him play lightning rod to our darkest, most transgressive impulses. But it starts to feel like too much of a bad thing.
It’s slightly surprising that Sadowitz is now at the centre of this week’s cancel culture carnival. The news that the Pleasance had cancelled the second of the comic and magician’s two scheduled Edinburgh performances was first written up by The Sun. Unlike the reports and op-eds that followed it, the paper didn’t frame the story as an example of “cancel culture” or slap its painful “Wokeipedia” logo on it.
Instead, the paper wrote the news up relatively straight, under the headline NO LAUGHING MATTER Controversial comedian’s Edinburgh Fringe show axed after he ‘got penis out on stage’ & made ‘indefensible’ comments, including comments from the venue and Sadowitz, as well as quoting an audience member who said:
I was at the show. He called Rishi Sunak a ‘p***’; said the economy was awful because it is run by ‘blacks and women’.
He got his penis out to a woman in the front row. The problem was not the audience — I knew he was an acquired taste. It was his indefensible content.
Once The Times picked up the story, however, the spin and supposition began to be applied liberally. Because The Times website has got into the extremely damaging habit of overwriting stories with new copy rather than publishing original updates3, I'm quoting from print version here.
The initial report, headlined Theatre criticised for cutting Fringe show, quoted a series of comedians criticising the Pleasance’s decision (Katherine Ryan, Viv Groksop and Richard Herring) on the basis that Sadowitz’s style is well known and the publicity material featured plenty of warning. At the end of the story, however, it introduced a seemingly unrelated argument:
Graham Linehan, the Father Ted writer banned from Twitter because of his views on transgender rights, said Sadowitz was “silenced because he refused to bend the knee to men in wigs.”
Linehan’s claim and The Times’ amplification of it despite no suggestion that jokes about trans people were part of the gig being cancelled are just one illustration of how the news story has become an excuse for rolling out pre-rehearsed lines.
So we get Alex Massie, again in The Times, performing one of the most audacious columnist cut-and-shuts in a long while:
Naturally, there is some distance between Sadowitz’s cancellation and the attempted murder of Sir Salman Rushdie. The latter is horrific, the former merely concerning. Nevertheless, it is also plainly the case that each exists on the same spectrum. The offence is both trumped-up and keenly sought, for in each instance the desire to be offended must take precedence over other considerations, including the artist’s right to be true to their own material.
“Some distance”. That’s an understatement equivalent to considering an Orient Express trip, “quite far”, or Agatha Christie “fairly obsessed with whodunnits”.
Mashing together the attack on Rushdie and a single venue’s knee jerk decision to cancel Sadowitz’s show is deeply unserious. But Massie is not alone in stretching for the connection. Also for The Times, Sarah Ditum makes the same clumsy ellision:
It’s particularly strange for the Pleasance to cancel Sadowitz for being offensive in the week that Sir Salman Rushdie was stabbed for, effectively, offending Ayatollah Khomeini with The Satanic Verses. Perhaps it seems absurd to bracket a comedian’s penis with an award-winning novel, but that’s the point about free expression. It doesn’t depend on a worthiness test. The right to offend is valuable on its own terms. If you put decency over comedy, comedy will be the loser.
And in the Telegraph, its theatre critic Dominic Cavendish writes:
That they de-platformed Sadowitz just after Salman Rushdie was attacked felt doubly uncomfortable. There’s a world of difference, of course, in being told that your show is cancelled, and being stabbed in the face. But how could the Pleasance feel on the right side of history? Though worlds apart in terms of finesse, and import – Rushdie is a highbrow culture hero, Sadowitz an increasing anachronism – are the two men not both flying the flag for freedom of expression?
Sadowitz is “flying the flag” for… Sadowitz. In a 2011 interview with The Guardian, he made that clear:
If I had known in advance that so many people would hijack the material I put across in my act, and what they would do to it, I would never have taken up comedy. Never. I'm sorry I've given some very nasty people a good living.
… My stuff comes from the fact that my life has been miserable. I now don't believe I have the capacity to be happy. I would settle for peace of mind. I'd give anything for that. But it's been a completely wasted life. Completely and utterly wasted.
But the literal cancellation of a show by a venue too quick to privilege complaints over artistic expression has quickly been translated to a coughing canary in the cultural coal mine. Columnists who spend a great deal of their time obsessing in print over theoretical cocks in toilet cubicles have been quick to accept and defend the real one exposed by Sadowitz on stage.
Similarly there’s a question about how quickly white comedians and writers leap to the defence of using racial slurs as artistic expression. Saying that someone has always got their cock out and always made racist jokes is not the defence some seem to think that it is. More over the debate is a battle of statements; the clumsy words of the Pleasance management versus Sadowitz’s character-breaking defence of himself.
I wasn’t in the room when Sadowitz performed that material but neither were the columnists who so surely argue that he was justified. In his most recent statement, Sadowitz writes:
… a lot of thought goes into my shows and while I don’t always get it right, especially at the speed of which I speak… and I don’t always agree with my own conclusions (!)… I am offended by those who, having never seen me before, HEAR words being shouted in the first five minutes before storming out without LISTENING to the material which I am stupid enough to believe is funny, sometimes important and worth saying.
Additionally, there’s a lot of silly, exaggerated irony and nonsense, real, fake, and exaggerated anger and bile, and even getting my dick out is for the purpose of the funny line that follows it…
I ask nobody to agree with anything I say or do on stage… God forbid they should end up like me … and I have never ONCE courted a mainstream audience to come to my shows because guess what?? In real life, I REALLY don’t want to upset anyone…
There’s nuance and thoughtfulness there that most of the columnists coming out to bat for Sadowitz lack. They see him simply as an example to be used to bolster their usual arguments.
Columnists need events to be symbolic of something wider. It’s what leads them to stitch together the unconnected — Rushdie to Sadowitz — and to warn of slippery slopes more often than a teenager with a Saturday job at Milton Keynes Snozone.
And newspapers require the pretence of expertise — however thin the veneer— which explains the sudden uptick in Sadowitz fans at publications that have barely noticed him for years.
British newspaper columnists pretending to be staunch defenders of complexity is a far grimmer joke than even Sadowitz could devise.
In full: “ "Nelson Mandela, what a cunt. Terry Waite, fucking bastard. I dunno, you lend some people a fiver, you never see them again."
In full: “Hello moose fuckers! I tell you why I hate Canada, half of you speak French, and the other half let them. Why don't you speak Indian? You might as well speak the language of the people you stole the country off of in the first place."
Something I’ll return to in detail in a future edition.