Stand Up Comedians

"...letting go of someone that you love and shared your life with is not an easy road to travel. Everyday feels like the journey just began and will not end."

"No amount of alcohol, late nights out and different girls can make the feeling of emptiness."

"What the activists did to comedy insofar is they were expecting audiences to sit there, hear the joke, assess whether it was morally pure, and then laugh to endorse the point being made. And that's not how laughter works."

"When the fashionable beliefs of our time are imposed onto historical works of art, they are invariably denuded of much of their profundity."

"If you're looking for a Disneyfied world of goodies and baddies, Shakespeare isn't for you. But this is precicely the world imagined by the high priests of critical social justice, those killjoys who have invaded the theatre industry and seek to deprive us of our cakes and ale. You're either in lockstep with every aspect of their doctrine, or you're on the wrong side of history. And when an ideology captures an organization, that organization ceases to function effectively and becomes a mere conduit for the propagation of the creed."

"I don't think that you can be an artist if you are simply trying to gauge what the acceptable point of view is. Or, indeed, if you are using your art as a conduit to express whatever the vogueish ideology of the time happens to be. And that is what has happened. If you go to any theatrical production in the [United Kingdom] now, nine times out of ten it will be a sermon disguised as a piece of entertainment."

"You have a minority of activists with incredible power in society who are treating their own extremist views and presenting them as though we've reached an established consensus in society, and it's not true."

"Yeah it’s the same old story of labels being important in terms of fighting for legal rights, but being so inadequate in terms of expressing nuances of existing. And as soon as you choose a label it ends up inflating that part of your identity above other parts that are just as important."

"I crave nature. When I’m in it, I love it. But I’m not a good camper. I’m good for the day."

"And being so confused, because I don’t feel like I want to go to the men’s changing room, and I don’t feel like I’m safe in the girl’s changing room."

"Getting a laugh out of someone is such a empowering feeling."

"It’s so frustrating that so much of identity is about comparison. I just feel like myself. I don’t even feel non-binary. I just wake up, have a coffee and go to work."

"[Asked "End of weekend dread?"] Monday is our Saturday, so no dread. Having different days off to the majority of people is great in so many ways. And working Saturdays means you never have to go to a wedding."

"[Q:] What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? [A:] I'm always a bit late, but I don't mind that, because it means that whoever I'm meeting is already there. [Q:] What is the trait you most deplore in others? [A:] I hate it when people are later than me."

"[Her] comedy depends on the cognitive dissonance between her appearance (primary school teacher in spectacles) and the filth she speaks."

"[Asked if she was bullied at school] I was never punched. I think verbal abuse is potentially worse than being punched in the arm. I got called names every day. I got called Norma-No-Mates and Speccy-Four-Eyes."

"All the conversation is focused around pronouns and things like that, and I’m like, however you read me is fine. I know how I read myself."

"I always wanted to be able to say I pay my electricity bill by telling cock jokes."

"I got divorced. I've got friends who got divorced and they did not do stand up – good to know it's not obligatory, but I think you have to do something. Some people drink and some people sleep around, and I was like, "I'm going to tell some strangers how sad I am. But in a funny way"."

"I’d love for us to reach a point where gender didn’t have to be the defining aspect of our identity, but we’re far from that."

"Exercise is key for me to just stay connected to the ol’ bode. It’s tough. Even though we know how to feel better. We know all these things. We just don’t do them. Everyone knows if they were on their phone less they’d be happier and more fulfilled. But it’s hard. Everything is designed to keep us distracted."

"My husband is part of my jokes and I have put him on stage sometimes; so he is supportive of my journey"

"I still get nervous at times for not knowing what kind or size of the audience to expect or even how they will receive you because it’s always a different reception"

"It’s funny how people think that we just jump on stage and start yapping yet we spend time preparing for the best show"

"From his stories told with a tough face, everyone in the family is crazy in their own way, We are all comedians by nature because we find fun in almost everything."

"George Carlin, probably the world’s greatest-ever comedian, once said that the comedian’s job is to find the line and then cross it."

"Modern life has become Orwellian and—in many ways—we’re all 1984’s Winston Smith now."

"Soviet citizens, including my great-grandparents, who made statements that were regarded as problematic by the authorities, were told, ‘Comrade, this may be factually correct but it is politically incorrect.’ In other words, political correctness originates from the desire to suppress the truth in order to protect and advance the prevailing political narrative of the day. How things haven’t changed!"

"Over the past century, socialism and/or communism has been attempted in more than two dozen places… None of them has succeeded. OK, some might have failed more spectacularly than other, but none of them has triumphed, at least not for more than a few months in the early stages. Why? Because, for all of capitalism’s flaws, radical socialism and communism—which are essentially two cheeks of the same arse—do not work in practice. They sound good and worthy, but they cannot withstand the ultimate stress-test of life."

"The students had every right to set their own rules, but I had the right to say their rules were stupid and make fun of them."

"As a rule, the more outward ‘diversity’ an institution has, the more political uniformity there usually is among the people within it. This is because those calling for ‘diversity’ don’t really want dissimilarity or opposing views. They just want certain groups to be promoted over others, and straight, white men taken down a peg. Never the other way around."

"The message I was given was clear: there is only one acceptable way of telling jokes and, if you don’t conform to it, then you should expect your career to die. It was all very, very Soviet."

"If the right loses the ability to say what it wishes, then that’s a loss for the left as well, because sooner or later that restriction is going to hit them. That’s a mistake that the millennial left tend to make. They think they’re always going to be in a position of calling the shots and making the rules, because they’re so right-on and woke. They think a climate of fear isn’t going to affect them, because they always have the correct opinions, but this is a huge mistake. It’s like young people thinking that they’re always going to be young."

"Put simply, suppression of free speech is a symptom of tyranny."

"This whole idea that the only reason people keep nattering on about free speech is that they want to use racist language and promote bigotry—that’s ignorant."

"This is why so few Russians are rarely, if ever, progressive liberals. They are too busy dealing with the harsh realities of life, such as having to pay the rent or feed their children on a shoestring budget, to partake in self-righteousness and identity politics."

"If anything, free speech is the kryptonite of fascism, regardless of whether it stems from the left or the right. It’s the ultimate disinfectant for bad ideas. Tellingly, this is often why these people are happy to limit free speech: because, beneath all the bluster and virtue-signalling, they have flimsy arguments that collapse under the lightest touch of critical analysis. So, instead of making their ideas more robust—which is what most people would do—they put down debate altogether and hope it goes away."

"She then adds that the primary motivation for contemporary censorship isn’t shielding people from ‘mean’ words but exercising power. ‘It feels good to tell people what to do. These people think they’re motivated by virtue, but the thrill isn’t doing good; it’s authoritarian: pushing people around and punishing them when they step out of line. It’s a predatory sport, and getting people sacked is one of the things you do on social media…and now in the mainstream media.’"

"Hand in hand with this new linguistic spin on diversity comes ‘inclusion’, which is another word that has been bastardised in recent years. Spaces, we are told, must now be made more inclusive in order for them to be healthy. However, on entering such a space, you’ll soon discover that some people are more included than others."

"The big difference between those ‘alternative’ comedians and today’s activists is that the former actually pushed against the establishment. They challenged the formula and rewrote the rules, whereas modern-day wokeness is the establishment. It sets the rules and enforces the punishments. Every major comedy agent, TV commissioner and producer is looking for the next woke act, preferably one who ticks as many diversity boxes as possible. This isn’t a bottom-up revolution; it’s a totalitarian cult in which people with power tell everyone else what they can and can’t joke about."

"What we have witnessed over the last two weeks—with enormous pro-Hamas rallies in cities like London, Paris, and Washington, D.C.—has the potential to change the immigration debate in a decisive way. It is much harder to pretend that allowing people to enter our country illegally is a moral good when you watch some of them celebrate mass murder in the streets of your capital cities."

"Western civilization has produced some of the most stunning scientific, technological, social, and cultural breakthroughs in human history. If you consider yourself “liberal” or even “progressive,” it must surely be clear by now that America and her allies are the only places in the world where your values are even considered values. If our civilization is allowed to collapse, it will not be replaced by a progressive utopia. It will be replaced by chaos and barbarism."

"Many people woke up on October 7 sympathetic to parts of woke ideology and went to bed that evening questioning how they had signed on to a worldview that had nothing to say about the mass rape and murder of innocent people by terrorists."

"But it’s not only comics who are self-censoring: increasing numbers of audience members are filing complaints against venues for allowing acts to ‘upset’ them. Years ago, such people would’ve been laughed out of town and told to grow up, but these days they’re taken seriously."

"We woke up on October 8 to the clamor of street protests in cities across the West condemning Israel even before any major Israeli response to the attacks. We watched celebratory crowds brandish swastikas and chant “gas the Jews” at events purporting to be about the loss of Palestinian lives. We saw Black Lives Matter chapters lionize terrorists."

"The events of the last two weeks have shattered the illusion that wokeness is about protecting victims and standing up for persecuted minorities. This ideology is and has always been about the one thing many of us have told you it is about for years: power. And after the last two weeks, there can be no doubt about how these people will use any power they seize: they will seek to destroy, in any way they can, those who disagree."

"The reality of life under the USSR is not something most people can accurately comprehend now, because it happened before most millennials were born and thus preceded the advent of social media, which means to most of my peers it might as well never have happened at all."

"Pavlik Morozov was murdered by his own family in retribution. But, eerily, I still catch glimpses of him in modern Western society, especially at this point in time, when we are routinely encouraged to put politics before the person, snitch on each other via government hotlines and prove our devotion to idealistic agendas."

"If there is one thing my Soviet childhood taught me, it’s that subscribing to someone else’s ideology will always inevitably mean having to suspend your own judgment about right and wrong to appease your tribe. I refuse to do so."

"Many comedians I’ve spoken to agree that this kind of entitled, moralistic response is more commonplace than ever before. Perhaps it’s related to what psychologists have identified as a general escalation of narcissistic behaviour. Or maybe it’s an inevitable by-product of social media, through which offence-seeking has turned into a kind of amateur sport."