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Frank Skinner admits he has been educated by “woke politics”, calling some of his previous jokes “offensive”.
The comedian, 67, presented The Frank Skinner Show from 1995 to 2005 before moving to radio.
Looking back on that time in a new interview with the BBC’sThe Today podcast, he said: “Sometimes even on videos of me from the Nineties, I see myself do a joke and I think, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that now,’ because it might be a joke I now find a bit offensive.”
Explaining that he is often asked, “Can you do stand-up comedy in the age of woke politics?” the TV and radio personality revealed the process he now uses to choose what to include in his work.
“My comedy is very autobiographical, I don’t make anything up, it’s just things that have happened in my life which I process through my comedy head,” he said.
“All this recent woke politics of the last 10 years has had an effect on me, I’ve become a parent during that period.”
Skinner, who grew up in council housing in Staffordshire before going on to becoming a university lecturer, said his adolescence was a completely different era.
“When I was growing up in the West Midlands, I got to be brutal: racist language, sexist language, homophobia – it was absolutely the norm,” he said.
“It wasn’t that I wasn’t listening to the alternate voice, there was no alternate voice. I didn’t even question it.
“But I do question it now, and I have questioned it a lot. I think most of us have in recent years, I don’t feel forced or bullied by woke politics – I feel educated by it.”
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He added: “So, I see stuff now and I think I wouldn’t do that now. But at the same time, it’s healthy to think that, because I don’t want to think of my life in stasis.
“I think the idea that we can improve, the idea that you can re-think your attitudes, there’s no point in woke politics if that doesn’t work.”
Skinner, who remains a member of the Catholic church, recently admitted to refusing to read his friend and long-time collaborator David Baddiel’s book. The God Desire, published last year, sees Baddiel wrestle with questions of faith and religion, along with his own certainty that there is no higher power.
“I told him I wouldn’t read it,” he told The Times. “I am in it and, to be fair to him, he sent me those bits and said, ‘If there’s anything you don’t like …’ because I do come off as a bit medieval when I say about a relationship, ‘I fear we will burn in hellfire.’
“So I didn’t read it, but I went to a discussion he did in Edinburgh and I really liked that, and afterwards we went and had a cup of tea and talked about it. And I said, ‘Look, I can’t get round the fact that the basic message of this book is ‘I’d love to believe in God, but I’m too intelligent’.
“And he said, ‘No, it absolutely isn’t that.’ And then we talked about it and about 10 minutes later he said, ‘Yeah, you’re probably right. Maybe it is that.’ And it is.”
