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The status quo is what you just said its small-mindedness and bigotry and stereotyping of minorities and marginalized groups.
That has been the status quo for centuries.
And what you are doing is you are talking like people have talked your entire life.
And you dont like being challenged.
Youre doing this routine.
These people also say, Im just trying to start a conversation.
Im just having a debate.
Youre not responding to them.
So, you dont know how conversations work.
You dont know how debates work.
So, therefore, this is ripe for comedy, because what you are doing is ridiculous.
Its funny to do a routine about this.
Free speech and hate speech are different things.
People just get more and more uncomfortable with change.
I want there to be a healthy boundary between me and the audience.
I dont want to encourage that in any way.
If Im talking to an audience about it, then Ive also talked to my family about it.
Ive talked to my friends about it.
Ive talked to a therapist.
Ive dealt with it with myself.
And then the people in the audience might think,Thats me too.
I will continue to go down that path and not get help.
You cant sort it out onstage.
So as long as youre not trying to fix yourself and its more cathartic, its probably fine.
Especially the part where you talk about calling the Samaritans, after your experience onThe Great British Bake Off.
Those things happened to me, and it was all I wanted to talk about onstage.
The more that I did it onstage, the more that it got treated like a mental-health show.
After I said what I say about having suicidal thoughts, I had people heckling me Man up!
or saying I was a crybaby.
He was right on the front, virtually in my lap.
And he just sat in the silence, until he said, Its hard, isnt it?
And I thought he was saying, Stand-up comedy is hard and youre doing it badly.
I got slightly defensive, but then he was like, Ive been through some similar stuff recently.
I was like, Oh, Im sorry about that.
And then he started crying.
I gave him a hug, because I thought thats what I should do.
Afterwards I was like,I have to check that that doesnt happen again.
I stumbled into that Samaritans bit.
In the special, I kind of undersell saying I called them.
I do it as a faraway thing, and I move quite quickly onto the next thing.
So then youre not assuming that the majority of the audience dont call.
And actually going like, Those of you who have done this, you know that this … Theyve all got something that theyve been made to feel ashamed of.
Thats mad that they did that to you, and actually, youre not weird.
The ludicrous thing is the system thats made you feel like that.
