When it comes to cancel culture and comedy, we know the routine. A standup boasts on Netflix about “saying the unsayable”. Some people protest. Clickbait articles ensue – and the delighted comic cashes in with a new TV special or lucrative tour. You could, just about, squeeze into this template the row over the cancellation of veteran comic Jerry Sadowitz at this summer’s Edinburgh fringe. Sadowitz has, after all, booked a gig at prestigious London venue the Hammersmith Apollo off the back of it. But he’s not exactly delighted. “Do you think it makes me feel good that I’m doing a gig at Hammersmith because of adverse publicity? Really? Do you not think I’d prefer to have been given the opportunity because I’m a good comedian?”
This is Sadowitz’s first published interview since the second of his two shows at the Pleasance was axed in August. His offence, according to reports, was to upset audience members and staff by making sexist remarks, exposing himself onstage – not for the first time – and using the P-word to describe Rishi Sunak. The Pleasance duly announced that, while it was “a venue that champions freedom of speech” and does “not censor comedians’ material”, Sadowitz’s second night was to be pulled because his material “does not align with our values”.
It felt like a new front opening in the endless debate about comedy and free speech because Sadowitz is not like the Jimmy Carrs and Ricky Gervaises around whom these debates usually swirl – and whom he calls, with scorn, his “copyists”. He’s more bilious, more extreme, but also (usually) more artful and contextualised. The nature of his act is well known – not least by the Pleasance, which has been booking him since the 1980s – and clearly signalled to audiences. “To complain about him being offensive,” the comic Richard Herring commented, “is like asking the actor who plays Macbeth to be arrested for murder.” Onstage-Sadowitz is a caricature: a top-hatted psychopath lashing out at anyone and everyone in the vilest possible terms, on to whom he might pin or project his own impotence.
Funny ha ha? Well, yes. As a long-term Sadowitz-watcher, I can attest to the potency, and brilliance sometimes, of his comedy, even as it plunges out of fashion. Part of it is about the laugh you elicit by saying – shouting, even – the things we tend not to say in polite society. But with Sadowitz, there’s something both more cartoonish and more horrific going on. We all have our misanthropic moments, and in them something ridiculous about us is exposed. Sadowitz escalates this to the nth degree, and when we laugh at him, we laugh at that – with added guffaws at the spectacle he makes of himself while bringing repressed impulses to the surface.
That’s what I think, anyway. But what does Sadowitz think? After the cancellation, which left 600 ticket-holders without a show to see, Sadowitz released a statement: “I am not J** D******* folks. [Jim Davidson, in case you’re wondering.] A lot of thought goes into my shows and while I don’t always get it right … 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.”
On the phone today, off the back of a tour around his native Scotland, Sadowitz is loath to discuss the affair further. “The show was fine,” he says. “Not the best show I’d done in my life, but it wasn’t bad. I overran by 15 minutes, and you don’t do that unless it’s going well.” As for the P-word: “I do a whole routine about it,” he says. “If you’ve seen the show, you’ll know. But I don’t want to give away my jokes and I’m not going to do that.”
This isn’t the only question Sadowitz stonewalls today. When I start to ask about cancel culture, he interrupts: “It’s not a culture. It’s a diktat that’s been imposed upon us. Not from the public, not from the Government. And I talk about this in the show, so I don’t want to go into it any further.” I ask again, repeatedly – I would rather this vaguely conspiracist claim wasn’t his last word on the subject. But Sadowitz won’t say more.
This is partly because – as someone who, per his August statement, has “never ONCE courted a mainstream audience” – he is uneasy speaking to journalists, frequently telling me that “these things are too complicated for soundbites”, as if it were soundbites I was asking for. But he’s also miserable right now. “Apart from anything, and I’m sure your readers are not the least bit interested, this year has been the worst year of my life.” There are personal reasons for this, on which he doesn’t elaborate. “So the cancellation in Edinburgh, in that context, is quite a minor thing.”
It’s no secret that the 61-year-old is prone to depression: this is the flipside of his splenetic stage persona. Speaking today, he sounds very flat, casting the furore as just the latest stage in the slow death of his comedy career. “I haven’t really had a career, have I?” he interrupts, when I use the word. I could protest: Sadowitz has a storied professional history. He was Ebeneezer Goode in the video of the Shamen’s hit single, and had his own Channel 5 show, The People vs Jerry Sadowitz. He was knocked unconscious by an audience member in Montreal after opening his set with the greeting: “Hello moose-fuckers.” He publicly called out Jimmy Savile for paedophilia as early as 1987, and has campaigned for justice for his friend Mark Blanco, who died in mysterious circumstances at a party attended by the rock star Pete Doherty in 2006.
But what, Sadowitz wonders, has all that amounted to? “I hardly perform, Brian,” he says now. “I perform at Leicester Square theatre, a few nights in Edinburgh. Then there’s the Glasgow comedy festival. And all those are slowly falling apart. So this conversation” – about his cancellation – “is getting more and more academic.” He tells me today, by way of “an exclusive”, that the Stand Comedy Club chain is now also refusing to book his work.
But Sadowitz absolutely won’t tailor his act to the changing tastes of audiences or venues, and reacts to the suggestion as if that were to betray every artistic principle going. “There are no lines to be drawn in standup, if standup’s an art form. No lines.” So there’s nothing you wouldn’t say on stage? “No!” He won’t elaborate on that but does add: “There are thousands of comedians out there, or people calling themselves comedians. If you want a commercial act, there’s loads to choose from.” But there’s a halfway house, surely, between an act tweaked in response to evolving sensitivities, and a total sell-out? “I’m not saying there isn’t,” says Sadowitz. “I’m just saying, ‘I do what I do.’”
So how does he describe that? “Sometimes I say things that I mean. Sometimes I say the exact opposite. Sometimes there’s a deep level of irony. Sometimes I say things for pure spite. Mainly I just try to be funny. Plus you get magic.” Did I mention that Sadowitz is widely acclaimed as one of the best close-up magicians in the world? (Sample trick: turning the letters T, W, A and T on four playing cards into the letters C, U, N and, well, you get the point.)
What he refuses to judge is whether audiences appreciate the irony, or the spite. “Look, that’s not a simple question and there’s not a simple answer. From an artistic point of view, I quite enjoy the fact that there’s a fine line with what I do. That people can laugh at the irony and at face value. I really hate when people say, ‘I get the irony, but the person sitting beside me was laughing at face value.’ I just think, ‘If they want to laugh at face value, fine, go right ahead.’ Surely that’s what art is? It’s open to interpretation.”
He goes on: “I wouldn’t continue performing if it was just an audience of Nazis. But I’ve been performing for 37 years and that’s not happened – so surely I’m doing something right.” And as for the idea, expounded in a letter to this newspaper after his fringe cancellation, that ironic hate speech “legitimises sexism, misogyny, racism and homophobia through comedy” – well, Sadowitz has no patience with this. “People are not stupid. They can laugh at all kinds of things without taking it home and into reality. I perform in front of generally intelligent audiences, and they get the stuff. They don’t go home and smash things up, do they?”
The problem for Sadowitz is their dwindling numbers. He refuses to be excited about playing live at the Apollo. “I expect only a third of the seats will sell. And of those, two thirds will come out of curiosity because of Edinburgh. And they’ll probably walk out. I think,” he adds glumly, “it’s exceptionally difficult for any newcomer to enjoy what I do.”
This is not, then, a man eager to exploit his summer of notoriety. Nor even to discuss it much. “It feels like you want me to say something,” he says at one point, “and I don’t know what it is you want me to say.” Maybe he’s right. As a Sadowitz sympathiser, maybe I want him to mount a stronger defence of his comedy, or to engage more openly with what he calls a diktat and what I see, at least in part, as cultural change. “I’m awfully sorry,” says Sadowitz. “It’s just a comedy act with magic. It’s not for everyone – and I’ve never attempted to persuade everyone to come and see it. Those that like it, come. If you won’t like it, don’t. It shouldn’t be made any heavier than that.”
• Jerry Sadowitz: Not For Anyone is at the Hammersmith Apollo, London, on 15 November
