Andrew Lawrence on the sanctimony of social media

Andrew Lawrences new show, Reasons to Kill Yourself, is more political, because he feels he needs to defend himself, particularly from other comedians who didnt like his criticism

The limits of free speech have been severely tested after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, with anti-Semitic French comedian Dieudonné arrested for showing solidarity in a Facebook post with kosher supermarket killer Amedy Coulibaly. So how far can comedians go in expressing their opinions or simply having a laugh?

On 7 January, after the Charlie Hebdo office had been attacked, comedian Andrew Lawrence posted: “All you hand-wringing Libtards whining incessantly about Islamophobia, you’re awful quiet today.” Mindful of the reaction this might provoke, the two-time Edinburgh Comedy Award nominee then added: “‘It’s too soon to make jokes about that Andrew’. I can’t help it if I’m over-efficient”. If tragedy plus time equals comedy, what price tragedy and immediacy?

Lawrence will be appearing at this year’s Glasgow Comedy Festival, which announced its line-up earlier this week. In 2006 the festival controversially neglected to admit Bernard Manning to the programme when he appeared in Glasgow, and Lawrence is currently experiencing similar pariah status, at least in stand-up comedy circles. Having long voiced his disillusionment with the comedy industry in his act, he declared himself the victim of a “witch hunt” after widespread condemnation of a Facebook post he made on 25 October last year, in which he slated the “unmitigated disaster of immigration”, criticised BBC diversity targets and denounced “hack, boring and lazy” comics cracking jokes about Ukip, pretending to hold views to curry favour.

Specifically, the 35-year-old berated “moronic, liberal back-slapping on panel shows like Mock The Week where ageing, 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”. His comments brought an immediate backlash, not least from fellow comics. He received support from other acts, such as Reginald D Hunter and Trevor Lock, though mostly they were “frustratingly” private.

He says he knew that the post would “polarise” but has no real regrets.

“Everything I wrote is what I believe. I didn’t say anything particularly subversive or controversial, except in comedy circles. These are viewpoints that many, many people hold. A lot of comics took umbrage with it and some, when it began to attract this unwarranted, ridiculous amount of attention, wanted to get a bit of attention for themselves.”

Heated online exchanges with the likes of Dara O’Briain, Frankie Boyle and Shappi Khorsandi followed. Stewart Lee wrote a Guardian article, headlined “The Imaginary Liberal Comedy Cabal will crush the Ukips into dust”, which stated that every comic he had recently met “expressed genuine and sympathetic concern for their colleague Andrew Lawrence’s mental wellbeing”.

Lawrence didn’t appreciate it. “Certain comedians, amongst them Dara O’Briain and Stewart Lee, conducted themselves in a very unpleasant fashion and didn’t make themselves look very good,” he says. “Not that I looked very good either.” The incident was part of the “sanctimony of social media, with its contrived and confected outrage”. It taught him only “the extent to which you can be misrepresented in the press, the extent to which people can twist your words and paint you to be something you’re not”.

Accusing the comedy industry and media of “corruption” and “militant liberalism” he also asserts that “three or four very, very big comedy agencies” are too powerful in determining which comics appear on television, especially on the publicly-funded BBC. Lawrence’s current live show, Reasons To Kill Yourself, alludes to his split with his longterm girlfriend, but also with his agent, Hannah Chambers, who still looks after Boyle, Jimmy Carr, Sarah Millican and Jack Whitehall. Even so, journalists read too much of his personal life into his onstage persona, he warns.

Few would dispute that Mock The Week projects a narrow and consensual political outlook, or that the BBC’s widely publicised quota of having at least one woman on each panel show raises questions of fairness. Regardless, plenty of so-so, white male comedians have been promoted beyond their abilities by television. So why tar the accomplished, experienced female and ethnic comics who’ve paid their dues to be there, with baiting phrases like “women-posing-as-comedians”. Or make thinly-veiled personal attacks on acts like O’Briain?

“It’s something that needed saying,” Lawrence counters. “There are female comedians who’ve been on that show purely because there are diversity targets in place for comedians who struggle to get paid work in clubs. It’s not me singling them out, it’s the BBC. Far too many female comedians are talking about sexism within the industry rather than letting their jokes speak for themselves.”