Andrew Lawrence (comedian) is being cancelled but doubling down (trigger warning)

[AdultHumanF]

TW: Liverpool crash

Andrew Lawrence is a comedian. He made a joke about the Liverpool crash earlier this week and is now being “cancelled” by many comedy venues and so on. Instead of apologizing, he’s doubling down and continuing to make jokes.

Im interested to hear peoples thoughts on this. Personally, I think it’s far too soon for jokes, and jokes about people being injured are rarely funny anyway. That said, I don’t know if it’s right to police jokes in this way?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq69zdpr0r5o.amp

I mean it's not been long has it ? Liverpool seems a close knit city who want to protect their own, this man probably reaped what he sowed !

I'm sorry, have we been transported back to the early 80s? It sounds like he has. 😕

He looks so annoying. I'm Scouse myself and I'm glad his show was cancelled.

I don’t know. I don’t think the joke is funny, or that is was necessary so soon, but people have always joked about tragedies, and I’m not a fan of cancel culture on the whole. On balance, I think it’s better to let people make up their own minds, so let him have his shows, and if people object they can just not turn up.

It was an awful thing that happened but nobody was actually killed and comedians have NOT been cancelled for joking about much worse things.
Having said that you don't joke about football and Liverpool, big no no

Tbh, I thought he'd been "cancelled" ages ago for some of the unpleasant views he'd posted on Twitter. He's certainly not appeared on TV for about 9 years. The fact that he's even been actually cancelled from a gig in Southend shows how far he's sunk.

It was less than 24 hours after it happened. There was no clarity on many things. SM went mental with fake news and so on.
Honestly, I can absolute see why he got backlash

He’s a really weird man and has been for years. He was relatively successful earlier in his career and had a couple of radio 4 shows. But somehow he’s gone down a rabbit hole of total unpleasantness and now he’s adopted the standard ‘anti-woke, hating ‘libtards’, two tier Keir’ bullshit bingo of X. Look at his recent rubbish videos doing ‘skits’. They’re deeply unfunny even if you agree with whatever political opinions he holds. He’s just trying to shock in an effort to keep his career going.

I personally don’t object to comedians making jokes, even unfunny ones.

He can say what he wants, within the law, but equally he has to take the consequences if venues decide they don’t want to employ him.

hes not in the least bit funny. He’s weird

Not surprised he’s being cancelled. He began posting on YouTube during the pandemic, getting ever weirder and more unpleasant. He had gigs cancelled in 2021 after posting racist comments online about Englands’ black footballers.

The joke he made was that he would drive through crowds of people to get out of Liverpool, and he’s posted skits on instagram based on the events of last Monday. It’s a miracle no-one died, but six people are hospitalised with extensive injuries so that - and the charges brought so far - could well change. It’s my view that free speech should mean just that, but there is a time and a place - and less than a week after the event, and with people’s lives still in the balance is not it.

Lawrence is doubling down and boasting online about the money he will make from the joke - a joke which even the fearless (and infinitely more intelligent) Ricky Gervais has described as ill timed and insensitive. That should tell Lawrence everything he needs to know.

He's just using a traumatic event to generate clicks and attention for the sake of his career. Real hero.

He's entitled to say what he wants but he can be called out for it as well, but the engagement is all he wants. The whole 'I'm being cancelled" is a grift in itself.

He has every right to be weird.

There’s always someone somewhere who will be offended. So what?
I’m not into cancelling people for telling jokes I don’t find funny. It’s a slippery slope.

As an aside why the hell is there a trigger warning on this thread title? 😆 The world’s gone bloody soft.

It looked like numerous fatalities were inevitable at the time he made the joke which was straight away.

There's a lot of things you don't joke about if you don't want a backlash. What if he made a joke about the girls killed at Southport or the Lee Rigby murder. He wants the backlash, that's the whole point. Attention is currency.

Possibly because those who were involved in the incident may be on MN?

He's a shock jock comic. That's his whole shtick. The jokes are lame anyway.

If the jokes just being unfunny had been the problem I doubt they’d have booked him in the first place. They clearly don’t have a problem with his usual ‘humour’ but places are allowed to take a moral stand and decide that things are not what they want to be associated with.

The fact that it managed to generate outrage on Twitter this days is a good marker of how poorly timed the ‘joke’ was.

It wasn’t a joke about football, it was aimed at the city itself, and poked fun at the victims, implying that he’d drive over people just to get out of Liverpool. It was also poking fun at the driver of the car who has an innocent wife and family.

Agree that there are comedians who haven’t been cancelled for saying worse, but they have had the decency to wait a respectful period of time before doing so, and the the ones who escape cancel culture are usually intelligent enough to recognise that you don’t make victims the target of your jokes. Do you hear any jokes about what happened in Southport ? Nearly forty years on no-one makes jokes about Hillsborough.

There may have been no-one killed but 79 people were caught up and traumatised less than a week ago, and six are seriously ill in hospital, including two children - so that may change. And all this odious little man can do is boast about how much money he’ll make out of the misery of others.

I don't know who he is so I concede he probably isn't funny. But that aside I don't think we should police jokes.

Scousers are a funny lot. Their whole vibe is ripping the piss out of other people but get tetchy when it's done to them. I can imagine it this was an incident done in St Albans we'd all be called soft southerners for not taking a joke.

It's a pretty feeble joke. I hope he has better material than that.

I’m a Scouser and l can assure you nobody would be ripping the piss out of an incident like this anywhere at any time - let alone five minutes after it had happened.

I'm sick off cancel culture. I have no idea who he is and there are plenty of people who I think are offensive. Ricky Gervais tells jokes about paedophiles and people with cerebral palsy but I don't think he should be cancelled.

There’s a world of difference between Gervais’ intelligent and thought out gags and what Lawrence said. A lot of Gervais’ comedy is irony and victims are never the target of the joke.